LT Wright waited until I was dressed to come over to me, watching me buckling my LBE over my body armor. My parka was in my ruck, along with the rest of my extreme cold weather gear. Moving through the tunnels in it would just end up with sweat soaking the first few layers, which would be deadly if we had to move the last few miles overland through the winter.

"Ready for phase two?" The LT asked me.

I nodded.

"That was nasty bruising, Corporal, are you all right?" he asked me.

"Fit to fight, sir," I told him.

He just nodded.

"You and Actual head for the end of the Excursion Tunnel," he told me. "At the ninety second mark I'm going to turn on the lights to the Motorpool, at the two minute mark, the lights to the Chow Hall, at the two-minute-thirty-second mark I'm going to turn on the lights to the Dispensary," he smiled.

"Meanwhile, Actual and I will be using NVG's to reach the end of the tunnel," I nodded. "Flamethrower's out. Tank and ejector are damaged, suit's compromised."

"You can turn on the lights at the entrance, correct?" He asked me.

"Yeah, but I'll need to override the local door controls from here. The Blackbriar Bitch locked down the door by swapping out the EPROM chip with the codes," I told him.

"Can you hotwire the door?" he asked me.

"What, you think I can hotwire it because I'm white?" I asked.

That made him laugh. "As a black male, I assumed everyone knew how to hotwire vehicles," he said primly.

"We just buy vehicles," I told him.

"Pfft, buying luxuries that you desire with remuneration acquired from gainful employment, that sounds like Communism to me," he said. "Possibly even homosexuality fueled Communism and downright Anti-American activities that would best be reported to Congress and the Senate."

That made Clarke, Nagle, Bomber and I all bust up laughing.

He gave us a couple of minutes then pushed his glasses up his nose. "All right," He said. We paid attention. "Who do you want to take with you?"

"Bomber, Red," I said. I looked at LT Wright. "Clarke."

"Interesting," He said. He frowned. "Why not Nagle or Stokes?"

"We've got patients," Nagle said. "Ant's faster than me, him and Bomber both."

"I've got one man down, heart attack, Doctor Woolworth used an atropine injector to bring him back," the LT said.

"Speed is what we're after. We know what to do," I told LT Wright, moving over to the keyboard. The command prompt was still up and I stood there, clicking away on the keyboard. "I'll set this up. When you see the lights come on, all you have to do is hit the enter key and we'll take care of the rest."

LT Wright shook his head. "The more the scientists figure out how to let computers do, the more I fear our humanity will slip away," he said. "I'm not Amish by any means, but I am beginning to wonder just how of our humanity we will lose just within my lifetime."

I nodded, finding the file I wanted. I'd written it back we'd been waiting to be rescued and it had worked back then. I figured with just a few little tweaks to less than two lines of batch-file code and it would work again.

"It won't be obvious until it's too late, but sometimes I worry that we will slowly lose everything to these machines as we allow them to think for us," He said. He suddenly shook himself and smiled. "Or perhaps I read too much Saberhagen and Niven."

"Better badlife than goodlife," I mumbled, locking my bayonet onto the lug at the end of the barrel and pulling the sheathe free.

"Exactly," The LT said, taking the bayonet sheathe when I handed it to him.

"Done," I said, exiting the text editor. I typed in the line and stepped back. "When the tunnel lights come on, send everyone down the tunnel, count to sixty, just hit enter, then run like the Devil himself's on your heels."

"Because he will be," Red mumbled. I looked at him and swore, stepping back. His eyes were completely white and he had milky tears on his face. "What?" He asked.

"Can you even see?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yeah. Pretty good too," he answered.

"What's your PT run time?" I asked Red.

"Fourteen-ten, I'm over thirty," he told me.

"Red's out," I told the LT. "He'd be too far behind us. Clarke, what's your PT run time?"

The LT nodded as Red made a disappointed face and stepped back.

"Thirteen-thirty," Clarke said as my hands ran on automatic, loading the M203. The LT raised an eyebrow again but said nothing.

"Bomber's is thirteen-fifteen; mine's twelve-fifteen," I said.

"Is anyone else even close to yours?" The LT asked, his eyebrow going up.

I shook my head. "Not that I've seen. Well, once guy, Chavez, but he's back at Graf."

The LT shook his head. "All right. You, Bomber, Clarke?"

I nodded. "I'll be a minute ahead, maybe more, on a mile run. Bomber sprints faster than I do, so he might be right behind me," I looked at Clarke. "Put everything you've got into it, because if you fall too far back you're probably gonna get snatched."

"Good incentive," Clarke said. He put the sling for the Pig over head head and arranged it. "Never let it be said that a brother allowed two white boys to outrun him."

"Channel the spirit of Jesse Owens, my enlisted brother," The LT said, slapping him on the shoulder.

"Will do, sir," Clarke said.

The LT watched, glancing down at the keyboard as I led Clarke and Bomber over to the ballistic shields that faced the Egress Tunnel. I knelt down, pulling my dogtags out of my top, and put them in my mouth, taking a moment to pray.

I wasn't surprised that John and Clarke both joined me.

"Fifteen minutes till we move out, everyone," The LT called out. "Those of you with patients, make sure the litter bearers are at the stretchers."

I raised my head, looking at the other two men, waiting for them to finish praying. I took the time to pull a cravat  out of my pocket and blow the clotted blood out of my sinuses, sniffing a few times to make sure they were clear.

"Think you can keep up this time, John?" I asked Bomber, grinning at him.

"Gonna try," John said, standing up. "You're usually not too far ahead of me at the end of the first lap."

"No holding back, no holding back, eye of the tiger, baby, eye of the tiger," Clarke was telling himself, standing up and swinging his arms. He looked at me. "We gonna warm up?"

"No, cold sprint," I told him, ambling toward the tunnel. "Run through the pain."

"Eye of the tiger, baby," Clarke repeated.

We got to the edge of the tunnel and looked at each other. I put the dogtags in my mouth, biting down on them, and pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

"On three," Bomber said. He set his NVG's in place, Clarke and I copying him.

I adjusted my rifle on its sling then shifted my ruck, nodding.

"Three," Bomber said. All of us turned on the NVG's, clicking the little dial to the IR lamp.

"FIFTEEN MINUTES!" The LT yelled.

"Two," Bomber got down in the start position. I gritted my teeth around my dogtags and took a deep breath. "ONE!"

The lizard slapped the button.

I launched up, throwing myself forward, holding my breath. Marathon trick, you hold your breath as long as possible, sprinting until the O2 is gone, making the capillaries and vascular system open wide. Forcing your lung alveoli to open wide to absorb the most oxygen out of the gas in your lungs, increasing gas exchange. Once you exhaled you dropped to race speed.

For me, that meant six to seven minute miles.

Bomber and Clarke both were a few paces ahead of me, pounding down the tunnel, as I poured on speed as we rushed into the darkness.

For a split second I could feel anger and malevolence wrap around me.

Then I was through it, still hammering, still sprinting, as first Clarke then Bomber dropped behind me. I was starting to see speckles but still held my breath, gritting my teeth into my dogtags, pushing myself hard.

This wasn't a PT test.

This was possibly the rest of my life.

The lizard pushed the fuel valves wide open, loading up the marathon and APFT protocols and dumping more adrenaline and other chemicals than normal. My rifle clonked against my head and I was outrunning my IR lamp, my brain barely having time to process what the NVG's showed me before I was through that patch of light already.

I spit out the dogtags and inhaled a controlled breath through my nose.

The air was ice cold, slicing at my sinuses, but I ignored the feeling, leaning forward slightly into the low-key downward slope of the tunnel, using it to force myself faster.

My ruck was bouncing off my back, hitting the back of my neck; my rifle kept thumping my helmet, which threatened to slide forward and hit my already sore nose.

I ignored it, putting more speed in.

hold nothing back eye of the tiger baby

Cold was starting to slice at my bare hands, try to worm its way into my uniform, wrapping around my neck in the hopes of choking me out, but I ignored it.

The furnace inside me ignited as the lizard computed the distance, realized I was less than a mile from the finish line, and slapped the FULL POWER button.

Strength flowed into my body as a calm settled over me.

a circle of lily-ads around a perfect lotus petal in the middle of the reflection  of the moon in a perfectly still pond

Everything vanished but a glowing point in my mind that was the finish line.

I was a marathon runner, a cross country runner, a man used to pushing his body until it thought he was dying just to cross an arbitrary line decided by other people. I was...

a meat machine powered by implacable will

...merely human.

I couldn't hear Clarke or Bomber's boots behind me and I didn't care.

Nothing mattered but the finish line.

I pushed even harder, pushed at a line that only existed in my brain, only existed in that humming perfectly still space deep inside my mind.

The lizard was running everything on short-circuited decision trees, on spinal reflexes, muscle memory, and dendrite firing. He loaded up anything I thought I'd needed, fired up and weighted the protoplasmic difference engine that had made him the most successful land predator ever.

Something lunged out at me but the lizard had seen the shadow bulge and shift as it came out from behind the ballistic shield. I put my shoulder into it, allowed the kinetic energy to force me to turn a complete circle, caught my balance, and took off running, not missing a step.

The mountain had only seen me wounded. Seen me beaten, hammered, destroyed. Had only put things against me when I'd already been pushed and shoved to the breaking point, only seen me when muscle was torn, bone was broken, flesh split, and blood spilt.

It was an ancient thing that hated before humans had stood on two legs.

I was Anthony Stillwater.

The Atlas Ant.

My rifle slid into my hands while my mind was perfectly centered, perfectly balanced, not even a ripple across the black mirror-like water of my mind. It took three steps for me to flip the fire selector to single then auto, ten steps before the rifle was set in my hands.

My hands weren't slow.

My feet were fast.

Something else lunged but I didn't bother identifying it, didn't bother to do anything but jink to the left, slam the bayonet home and pull the trigger, allowing the shuddering impact to spin me around in a circle again.

Someone fired behind me.

I was still moving, past the corner, still pounding down the brushed steel hallway.

They can't stop me...

...nobody can stop me...

...I am merely a man.

Another lunge, another rattling full auto--fire dump before my beyond even really hit, before I transferred the kinetic energy of my run into the figure in front of me, making it so the bayonet didn't get stuck and whatever I'd hit was basically fucked by six rounds of 5.56mm NATO gofuckyourself hammered out at 900m a second.

I spun in a pirouette, regained my balance, and kept running.

The lizard played Fur Elise in my head as a reward.

I pushed my legs harder, trying to catch up the bullets that were howling off the walls ahead of me, trying to catch up to the sparks of the copper jacketed slugs bouncing off of steel.

I could see it, the LED's for the control panel.

I pushed harder, leaning forward.

I could see the tape. See the end of the run.

The LED's burned silently.

It didn't bother with the tackle. Not this one. This one new better. This one knew what it was doing.

I saw it a split second after it saw me.

Black uniform, perfectly tailored. Silver edging and awards. Skin stretched tight over his skull, baring his teeth in a grin or a death rictus, either one.

His Waffen-SS uniform was perfect.

So was his aim with his MP40.

We both pulled our triggers at the same time.

I went down, landing on my ruck, feeling like a score of hornets had stung my thighs and arms, my stomach and chest kicked by a dozen horse hooves at once. My helmet came off and thumped to the floor.

The rest of the magazine in my sixteen rattled into his chest, blowing through him, the 5.56mm rounds flattening against the concrete behind him, blowing divots in it.

He clicked his tongue thrice as he changed magazines, pulling it from the pocket of his dress top.

I shifted my grip so my hand was wrapped around the expended 30-round magazine.

He lifted his 9mm MP40 SMG as I lifted my rifle, coughing but not tasting blood.

His smiling rictus got wider as he saw my empty rifle. His chuckle was a dark thing, a mocking thing, and I could tell by the glittering in the dark pits surrounding his gleaming sapphire eyes that he knew it was hopeless.

His voice was a grinding buzzing thing as he grinned that death's head grin at me.

"Nur untermenschlich."

I pulled the trigger.

And the 40mm APERS hit him dead center of the chest.