Room 325
Building #1, (Barracks)
Task Force 38 Intelligence Area
Secure Area
Alfenwehr, Germany
1000 Hours
28 October, 2004

The whole room smelled of steam, the shower running after we'd taken turns standing in it to warm up. The windows were welded shut, Lexan in place of glass, and the knob taken off the heater so that it would only keep the room barely above freezing. We were still naked, and blood was still oozing from the wound in my stomach and the exit wound in my back.

"You're goddamn lucky you lost that kidney already," Bomber said, tapping the scar on my back, "Otherwise you'd be in a shit pile more trouble." He stood up and walked around in front of me.

"You've gotten fat, Texas," I told him, looking away when he squatted down to get a better look at the wound on my legs and torso.

"He knew you could handle these," He told me, tapping my thighs. "He missed the bone on purpose." He suddenly chuckled. "Really, dude, that reaction?"

"Piss off," I told him, "I was in college."

"Any fun?" He asked, standing up and brushing off his hands.

"Yeah, it was," I grinned, "Got Heather hot as hell." I got serious, "That a problem?"

He shrugged. "Hey, you never busted my chops about the fact I'd get drunk and nail a he-she in the back of your car."

That made me laugh. "You always practically screamed they were girls."

He shrugged, "They said they were girls, they had tits, and wanted to fuck."

"And you weren't cheating," I said, walking over to the wall lockers.

"And I wasn't cheating," He admitted, following me. "They're empty, I checked."

I shook my head, opening the door. The mirror was gone, but that was no surprise. "Christ, John, did you get stupid as well as fat?" I looked at him, then tore the door off. "How many survival classes when they shut down Special Weapons and moved us to Continuity, huh? Did you just forget all of that?"

"Don't call me stupid," He growled.

"Then think, goddamn it. You're a fucking genius, you speak eight languages for fuck sake, you can fucking compute fuel to thrust to weight to consumption ratios in your goddamn head that NASA still uses fucking computers to do," I told him, turning and pushing him, hands against his chest, "Remember your goddamn training, remember who you are, what you are, you aren't some fucking civilian who breaks down and gives up just because they lost everything." I turned away from him, "We were taught to fight when there was nothing left but butchery."

"Don't you turn your back on me, Stillwater," John growled.

"I don't need Sam English, I need John Bomber," I told him, "John would know I'm doing something, John wouldn't be so easily butt-hurt." I opened the next locker and tore it off the hinges.

I could hear John thinking, knew he was shifting gears. "I spent quite a few years as Thomas DeMarky, John, and it wasn't easy to pull him down." I looked at him, "They're medicating you, aren't they?"

He nodded, looking at his shoulder where I'd already seen the injection bruises.

"The bloody nose, John, they're dosing you with Sticky Bromide, aren't they?"

He nodded. I smiled and tapped my swollen nose that he'd set only a little bit ago. "Same here. They dosed me up really good the other night. IV anti-psychotics, all of the medication I used to take to make me be Thomas DeMarky."

He shuddered, "You think he's keeping us drugged?" He asked. I nodded. "Why? Why would he keep us on the drugs we're supposed to take? To keep us lucid enough?"

"What drug package is he using on you, John?" I asked him, squatting down to examine the door's edge. It wasn't like the original barracks, wasn't solid wood, it was cheap fiberboard shit with a thin plastic laminate on it.

"Not sure," He said. "They just gave them to me, or injected me with them, and I never asked." He took a look at the interior of the lockers. "Goddamn it, cheap fiberboard." He reached out and tore another door off, looking at it and throwing it behind him. "Goddamn it, this used to be..."

...the airfield...

...the motorpool...

"Yeah, it did," I said, stopping and stepping back. "John, run the numbers with me." I turned around and walked to the window, tapping on the Lexan. "This isn't glass, right? These windows are welded shut, right?"

"Yeah?" he frowned slightly. Good, he was thinking. i could practically see him shedding who he had been, who he had been hiding under all these years.

I walked to one end of the room, then counted it off with my feet. "I'm a size 12 wide combat boot, we know my feet are twelve inches long,"

"So what?" He said, then frowned, "Wait, how many was that?"

"Thirty-five," I said, pacing it off again. "Yup, thirty five." I paced off the main room, then the distance from the entry door to the far wall. "Forty-five."

"That's not right," He said, looking at the floor. He knelt down and counted the tile. "Wrong number of tiles."

"We should know, God knows we spent enough time face down on it," I chuckled, then groaned as it felt like something tore further in my guts. "Goddamn it."

"This is close, but what the hell?" He asked, running his fingers over the tile.

"I don't know," I told him. I walked over, picked up the locker door, and slammed one of the hinges against the corner of the wall, knocking it free. "Grab that one," John grabbed it while I repeated my action before picking it up and starting to pick the fiberboard off of it.

"When they were bringing me up here, they showed me what got the military interested," I told him. "The buildings weren't here, then they were on the scans. The DoA found some records with my soc' attached to it, and brought me in."

John was rubbing the paint on the wall, peeling up a strip of the thick rubbery paint. He put some on his tongue, chewed on it for a second, then spit on the floor. "It's polyurethane base modern polymer paint, not the old lead shielding paint."

I managed to pry the tile off the floor, it snapping in half, and then scraped at the glue and black paper underneath.

"Gonna dig your way out?" He chuckled, moving over to the window frame. "Let's see if they went off the old building plans without really understanding them." He ran the hinge along the window, peeling up caulk. "Silicon base, not the shitty old glue, and not the type of frame we used to use. Looks like it, but it's aluminum, not case hardened steel."

"Projection?" I asked, leaning back from the concrete. It was standard concrete, slightly grayish white, uncompressed, untreated. I looked at John, who was rubbing the hinge on a cinderblock. "There's only a thin coating of wax, nothing like the buildup you see in an old barracks, and the concrete and tile are wrong. What's you're take?"

"Sixty seconds," He said.

"I'll doublecheck," I told him, walking into the bathroom. I knelt down and looked at the pipes under sink. Standard chrome. The pipes in the barracks had been steel. Chrome coated was thin, brittle, would have been more expensive than the plain utilitarian that we got.

When I came back he was blowing into the hole he'd worn in the cinderblock.

"Hollow. No cement core," He said, turning around and facing me. "This whole building is a goddamn fake. It's all a fucking fake!"

"Tandy isn't. The dead aren't." I said, walking forward and grabbing his shoulders. "I've fought them, seen them, John. The building's fake, but not the goddamn mountain." I let go of him and turned around, walking toward the door. "I don't fucking get it."

"This whole thing stinks to high heaven now. You know, I know it, we just gotta figure out what is so rotten that it stinks this bad," Bomber said, walking up next to me and facing the door.

"I worked construction a few years ago," I told him.

"Couldn't hold a job?" He asked.

"Yeah, not till I got medicated, not till I went to Astoria and got work as a bartender," I admitted.

"Where they filmed Goonies?" He asked. "Nice."

"Yeah," I chuckled, "Anyway, I learned something. In the past few years, maybe a decade or so, there's been two types of lumber and building materials used: true-measure and standard. Standard is like an eighth of an inch smaller."

"And that adds up," Bomber said, nodding, "Which is why the measurements are off."

"We've been played," I told him, starting to pace. "It doesn't make any sense. Who the hell would invest this much money, this much time and goddamn effort into building all of this?"

...Alfenwehr will help us make men like you...

"The Alphabet Boys," We both said in unison.

"But why?" I asked, still pacing, "The little one, he was talking about how they don't make men like us any more, but Alfenwehr would let him. I mean, he was talking fucking crazy."

"Maybe he's just a fucking nut?" John asked, shrugging.

The door opened and we both turned.

More guys in digicam. Four of them, two carrying bags, unarmed, with two armed ones following. They were armed with MP-5's, the laser dots sweeping across the floor.

"Put it on, tough guys," one said, tossing the bags on the floor.

I bent down, unzipping one and scooting the other to John. There was an old BDU uniform folded neatly inside, with Specialist rank on the lapel and BOMBER above the right pocket.

"This is yours," We  both said at the same time, sliding the bags to each other.

"Get dressed," Another one said. I could feel the hatred in his voice. The laser dot trembled as it crawled up me.

We silently dressed. Everything was right according to the 1986 AR 670-1 and the 2/19th uniform modification supplementary documents. Shined jump boots for John to go with his airborne patch, jungle boots to go with my Jungle Warfare School badge. Boot blouses. Boxers, brown T-shirt, pinnable rank for John, like his old habit, sewn on for me. Empty knife sheathes at both of our backs, a Bowie one for John, a Gerber Mark II for me. Earplug case for both, decks of cards that I thumbed through quickly and saw matched the ones the Military Intelligence confiscated from me. There were gauze pads with adhesive sides that I put over the stapled wounds.

"Just like old home week, eh, Ant?" John said, moving up next to me.

"Not quite," I grinned at him. "Nobody we have to worry about is trying to kill us."

John snorted.

"Think this is funny, bitch," One of them asked, stepping forward.

"He's just ass-mad because I probably killed his lady-boy," I sneered.

The pissed off one with the MP-5, who stepped between the two armed ones, lifting up the sub-machinegun. "Think this is funny, smart guy?" He asked.

Almost a decade may have gone by, but there was no room for either of us to talk.

The lizard hit the button.

They were sloppy. Too close, too bunched up, the armed one in the back losing most of his firing arc, and all of his ability to hit John or me, all of them sloppy as shit. Red River hired primarily from Special Forces from all over the world, their numbers expanding explosively as the State Department began using them for everything from guarding diplomats and sensitive targets to running missions in the war zones that they didn't want complications due to some Army or Marine lunk-head with morals that didn't cooperate with what the Alphabet Boys or the State Department wanted done.

They were the best of the best, and they fucking knew it.

...there's always someone better, boy...

John grabbed the barrel of the MP-5, pulling it toward him at the same time as he stepped forward, his fist punching out, his middle knuckle extended slightly and sinking into the guy's body right at the sternum. I heard it crack, and the guy's face turned bluish color as he dropped.

A chop to the throat put the first one down on his knees, trying to breathe through a shattered trachea, and the second one managed to get his hands up without realizing that I was already stepping to the side to smash the heel of my boot against the side of his knee. It went with a crack but I was still moving, chopping down on the barrel of his weapon. It went off, into the back of the guy who was just starting to scream. One of them threw a kick at me but Bomber stepped up, catching the leg and breaking it.

John and I had spent most of our times outnumbered, fighting superior numbers, always outgunned, it was just the way it was.

The six of them didn't stand a chance. One stunned me, sending me stumbling back with a knee into my side, slamming it into the gunshot wound, but John grabbed him, punched him in the ribs four times. The guy coughed blood on the second, and collapsed when John let him go. One went for John, trying to tackle him but I broke his knee with a stomp, turned, slapped away the fist aimed at me to bleed off its power and took the hit in order to break his arm, then his face.

It was savage, it was brutal.

One swung a knife at me and I grabbed it out of his hand and shoved it into his throat, turning in time to block a swing at me from another knife. John grabbed the guy's arm, broke it, and took the knife from him. I grabbed the last one, yanking him around, and John drove his big Texas fists into his ribs in a quick combination that made the guy jerk spasmodically then go limp in my hands. John grabbed him up, roaring in rage, and dropped him down on his knee, breaking him.

Clapping stopped us.

"Again, incredible," The small man said, still slowly clapping, "You two are more lethal together than you are separately," Before we could move he did a crisp right face and walked away, still clapping and speaking. "The whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts."

I looked at John and flashed the danger sign at him, which he answered with the 'no-shit' signal. I pointed at myself and he shook his head, pointing at me and then at the wedding ring scar on his left ring finger, his finger bare.

They'd even taken that from him.

He walked out first, following the clapping, and I walked out next, stopping as soon as I saw what was in the hall in front of us.

Taggart knelt in front of him, naked, her hands ziptied in front of her. She looked up at us and gave a weak smile marred by the fact someone had broken her nose, busted up her mouth, and left her with black eyes and bruises all over the left side of her face. She had gotten fatter over the years, matronly, a good solid farmer's wife. Her breasts sagged, and her belly was rounded with the fat from giving birth to eight healthy children. I could see the tattoo on her right shoulder, the III CosCom patch  with "Atlas All the Way!" on top and "2/19th Special Weapons" underneath. Milky drops fell to the floor from her nipples.

"Hi, Ant," She smiled, her words slurred by the swollen lips. "Just like old times, eh?"

"Hey Taggart," I said, moving forward a step.

"Goddamn, son, look at you two. Shot, stabbed, beaten, bloody, and you two don't even think it's stopped," He grinned wide.

...his voice...

"I knew throwing him in with you would bring you back, Mr. Bomber, just like I knew you'd give him the strength to fight again," He smiled. We took another step forward and he leveled his pistol to the side, pointing it in a doorway. "You two," he shook his head, still smiling, still not taking his eyes from us, "Cold forged in this place, raw strength reshaping the steel Special Weapons school had burned you two down to."

"What do you want?" I asked, taking another step.

"Ah ah ah," He said, smiling at me. He moved slightly to the left, making room. "Come out, my dear, show them your pretty face."

"I'm sorry, Ant," Taggart said, "I tried, I really did, but..."

"I wouldn't kill her," Shorty said, smiling, "And I told my men if they did, I'd kill their families." He waggled the pistol, "Come out, dear."

Nagle stumbled into the hallway, stripped naked, her body and face showing signs of brutal abuse. She lunged at him, trying to get a shoulder into him, but he stepped back, tripping her, and smashed her across the back of the head with his pistol. She went face first into the floor, her nose splattering.

"Now, now, dear, calmly. They'll need you in a moment, Miss Nagle," he said.

"Just kill us, bastard," Taggart said, turning and looking behind her.

John and I started moving forward, hefting our knives. I knew I was smiling, and I could see John smiling that big Texas grin.

"Miss Nagle, you may want to pay attention," Shorty smiled. Nagle rolled over, staring at him with confused eyes.

Bomber and I took another step forward.

"Someone will be needing your expertise soon," He smiled.

"Wh.. what?" Nagle asked.

He leveled the pistol at Taggart's upraised face. "Your medical expertise, Miss Nagle," he said.

"Miss Taggart is pregnant, you know? She's never once begged for the life of her unborn child," He said conversationally. "This place forged her just as surely as it forged you, forged all of Actual, all of Atlas." He lifted the pistol as we took another step. "Although she begged for you."

He shot John and me both, quickly, twice in the stomach. John grunted and went down on one knee, but lifted his head and stared at Shorty. I took another step forward, the lizard slapping the button to cut off my pain. To hit that circuit breaker in the back of my skull that shut off pain completely. He hit purge right after that, and I felt my bladder let go.

"Look at him, still on his feet," Shorty said, his voice full of glee, "I'm telling you, this guy is unstoppable."

My left knee buckled, but I struggled and took another step, this time my right knee buckling from under me, but I stayed on my feet. Behind me John put a bloody hand on the wall and tried to pull himself up.

"Look at them, Miss Taggart, still advancing, still coming at me," He lowered the pistol back to her face.

She spit in his face, but he just smiled.

"Still trying vainly to save you," He said, pushing the pistol under her left eye, forcing blood from the pre-existing cut...

And pulling the trigger.

Taggart slumped to the side, one eye hanging loose from where the expanding gases had ruptured her face and blown it from the socket. Brains and hair splattered on the floor and the side of the hallway as she collapsed. As she rolled I realized it wasn't old fat that made her belly big.

It was the new baby.

All three of us screamed in rage and denial. Nagle kicked at Shorty but he just stepped back, lowering his pistol and clasping his hands in front of him, his pistol under his free hand.

The hallway door to the left of me opened, and I turned to look.

Just in time to catch a rifle-butt in the face that dropped me to the ground.

"Drag them all, bring the dead woman," Shorty said, "Miss Nagle will come along peacefully..."

"Like hell I will," Nagle spat.

"...after all, she only had a few minutes to get the baby out of her dead friend." Shorty smiled as hands picked me up.

Shorty reached down, holding his hand out to Nagle.

"Come along, Miss Nagle, Room 275 awaits," He said. Nagle slapped his hand away, moving over to scoop up Taggart's body in her arms. She was still big, still thick bodied, layered with heavy muscle even though her hair had streaks of gray. Taggart's head lolled back, blood and worse falling from the hole in the back of her skull. I saw her stomach move, flex, as the baby began to struggle.

"The door to room 275 is open, you may want to run," Shorty laughed.

Nagle ran.

Taggart left a trail of blood on the tile.

Blood that my toes smeared as the two men carrying me dragged me down the hall after them.

"Be seeing you soon, Ant," John coughed next to me.

"Be seeing you soon, John," I answered.

"Goddamn, gentlemen, look at that, they still aren't stopped," Shorty laughed. "We're going to make men like that again."

"We'll make you into men like those two."