"The cold was an ever present factor

in my life for half the year.

Did you know blood will freeze in seconds?"

2/19th Company Area
Restricted Area, Fulda Gap
Western Germany, Europe
09 November, 1985

I woke up on the top bunk, with the usual glaze of ice on the ceiling above my head from where the moisture in my breath had frozen, shivering from the cold even under my heavy quilt and two issue OD green wool blankets. Nancy's absence told me that she'd left my bed while I was sleeping and returned to her room. She'd stayed long enough for me to go sleep in her arms after we'd had sex, and the fact that she'd gone back to her own room wasn't a surprise. She was rarely there when I woke up, usually only because she'd had too much to drink or because she'd been too exhausted to stay awake.

The fact she was gone caused a small ache in my chest and I cursed myself for being a weakling. I knew better than to form any attachments to someone like Nancy. The fact that Bomber was leaving soon had reminded me I was stupid to form any kind of emotional attachment while I was in the military.

For a long time I glared at the patch of ice I could faintly make out. I had to piss pretty bad, so I threw aside the blankets and climbed down, careful when I put my weight on the floor. Sure as Hell, a thin patina of ice coated the waxed and polished tiled floor. The room was silent, dark, and lonely; my roommate with the rest of the unit at Grafenwoehr and Nancy back in her room. The room was almost pitch black, just faint light oozing in around the curtains and through where I'd left them a hand span separated. A quick glance showed me that the lights on my stereo system were dead, so I didn't even bother with the light switch when I moved past it on the way to the small bathroom in my room.

The power was out in the barracks again.

I took a leak, naked and shivering from the cold, flushed, and moved over to the sink to wash my hands. Although I couldn't see the mirror or my reflection I put my hands on either side of the mirror, the pain from the cold cinderblocks was something I relished for a moment before speaking.

"Nobody likes you. You are worthless beyond the fact that you will die so that someone better than you will survive. You will never be worth anything more than whatever good your death can do. Nobody will ever love you, everyone can barely tolerate you, and you deserve nothing good." I told my unseen reflection. "You will die alone, and nobody will know or care that you are gone."

Satisfied I'd reminded myself my place in the world, I turned from the unseen mirror and went over to my desk to grab my keys then headed back to my wall lockers, which were built into the cinderblock wall of the room. In the darkness I unlocked and opened them, so I could get dressed. Long johns underneath a T-shirt, jeans, and a flannel shirt, with nice warm socks and my combat boots still wasn't enough to keep the cold from seeping into my body. My gloves were on the desk, wool liners and leather gloves, but I figured I wouldn't need them just to hop down to the CQ Area and back. Just in case, though, I dropped the inside flaps of my soft cap down and pulled it onto my head, covering the ¼ inch of blond fuzz that passed for hair on my head. Normally, you weren't supposed to wear a cover inside a building, but it was too cold to mess around, and there wasn't anyone around to bitch at me for breaking regs in order to stay warm.

Plus, rules were different on the mountain.

Shivering, I grabbed my keys, flashlight, and wallet off of the top of my desk and then headed out the door, locking it behind me. The hallway was as long as a city block, pitch black with just a dim glow from the emergency lights providing light, and had ice glittering redly on the walls. I thumbed on my flashlight and clipped it to the pocket of my flannel so I didn't have to bother holding onto it. The light didn't do much to illuminate the hallway, just made the frost on the walls and on the tile floor glitter in the darkness. I walked down toward the double doors that separated the hallway into two halves. Up on the second floor, where I lived, both sections were known as "Hammerhead Hall"; on the first floor the end closest to the Charge of Quarters desk was known as "Titty Territory" and housed the female soldiers, while the far end was known as "Queer Country" where known homosexuals and bisexuals were housed.

Despite the fact that homosexuality was normally a reason to be ejected from the military, our MOS was chronically understrength, to the point where something like open homosexuality was ignored. Numbers are what mattered, the mission came first, and something like sexual preference wasn't about to get in the way of the unit accomplishing the mission as far as the Department of Defense was concerned. I'd learned that the biggest problem with homosexuality was the fact that it made the person in question susceptible to blackmail by the Soviet Union. Being in the closet meant that the KGB could threaten someone with revealing their secret to the military, to their family, to their hometown, in hopes of gaining whatever intel they needed, but being open about it, well, nobody really cared about it.

Plus, no matter how DoD looked at it, let's be serious, all you could say to a guy who has possession of an entire site of nuclear and chemical weaponry is, "How's liking the cock working out for you?" To say anything else made you into a goddamn idiot who deserved what he got. I wasn't thinking of any of that, though. I was more concerned with the fact that the power was out, the temperature was dropping, and there was only a handful of us in the barracks.

Something banged and screamed behind me as I approached the double doors.

I hunched my shoulders and pushed my hands into my pockets, ignored the low moan as I passed the laundry room and pushed my way through the double doors, the wire reinforced glass covered in a thick layer of frost. The pushbar was wooden, otherwise it was cold enough that I would have left behind skin from my hands when I pushed down on it to open the door. A whiff of decay, rotting meat and the unmistakable subtle scent of rotting blood was whipped away by a cold breeze that swirled around me until the doors closed and my breath plumed out in front of my face.

My jungle boots thudded on the tiles as I headed toward the far stairs, passing by people's rooms. People I knew, people I drank with, fought with, and worked with. People that had gone back to the States or were deployed to Graf or Bremerhaven, leaving only a skeleton crew of 24 "mission essential" personnel behind in the cold isolation of the barracks. I opened the door to the main forward stairwell, which went 2 stories above me and 2 stories down, the last underground from the front side of the barracks, at the level of the parking lot and loading docks on the back side. A shriek sounded from upstairs, followed by a low sobbing moan from the darkness below me. I shivered and went down the flight of stairs, keeping one hand on the ice slicked wall in case I hit a patch of ice, which might have coated over the grip strips, and went down the stairs. It wouldn't help me, but it was more habit than anything else. It was just prudence.

Prudence meant survival. A lesson 2/19th taught quickly.

I pushed open the door that led from the stairway to the CQ Area and panned my flashlight around the room. Between shining my flashlight and the dim red light from the emergency light behind the CQ counter, I took in the whole room. I'd noted that the door to the 1st Floor Rec Room was closed, along with the doors to the Day Room, the Game Room and, of course, the unisex bathroom that nobody used.

The same bathroom that Tandy vanished out of before the building had burnt down. The bathroom had one door in or out, no windows, and he'd vanished until his body had been found the following spring on the other side of the mountain by two privates that had gone out to man an observation point we'd dug earlier in the day. The military had ruled that Tandy had died of exposure, and the melting snow sliding down the mountain had carried him almost five miles to the other side of the mountain. Except, when I'd scouted out the area for the Forward Observation Post earlier that day, Tandy's body hadn't been there. The whole official story was bullshit as far as I was concerned.

I'd watched with my own eyes as the ambulance crew loaded Tandy's body up and left with it, and had seen my older brother write up the reports since he had been Sergeant of the Guard when Tandy's body had been found. I'd helped put the white cloth strips called "Engineer Tape" around the body while we waited for CID and the MP's to arrive to examine the area where he'd been discovered.

That didn't mean Tandy was gone, though. Either he or someone wearing a sick mask had knocked on windows, stalked people on guard duty in the motor pool, and once even attacked someone. Rumor control stated that either the coffin had arrived Stateside empty or Tandy had vanished from the post morgue.

Now he haunted our side of the mountain, and three disappearances that had been officially listed as "death by misadventure" were rumored to be Tandy taking them. We talked about him in whispers and wondered what he wanted, or what whatever dark force inhabited the man's body could want from us.

A low moan drifted through the dark room as I stared at the bathroom door, remembering what Tandy had come to mean.

I pulled my attention from the bathroom door and the thoughts, panning the flashlight out again.

"Jakes?" I called out. Specialist-Six Jakes was the NCOIC of the Charge of Quarters for the night. He was the Section Sergeant for Second Section, First Ammunition Platoon and had been in the unit since about a month after the barracks had burnt down. Not one of the First Twenty, as those of us who had been there and survived called ourselves, but a solid NCO all the same.

No answer, except for the emergency light behind the desk giving it up and slowly fading out, pulsing slower and slower, before finally being nothing more than a faint red glow, more felt than seen.

No CQ, no ACQ, no Duty Driver, no Assistant Duty Driver, no nothing.

Just me, shivering and breathing out plumes of steam.

That wasn't like SPC-6 Jakes.

The man would be considered an anal retentive micro-manager in any other unit, but his attention to detail, his insistence that both the written procedures and the unwritten rules were followed, and his careful method of making decisions had meant that he hadn't lost a single soldier to the dangers of the units and the sites. His section had suffered injuries, yes, including a few bad enough that the soldiers who had suffered from those injuries had been medically discharged, but no deaths.

Unlike my own Section Sergeant, he was willing to stand up to the Chief, and it was a favorite story of us enlisted about the time he'd walked into the Chief's office and told him that as soon as the Chief left his office to go home, Jakes would bring his crews in. That his crews would only work as long as the Chief and not a second more.

He wouldn't leave the CQ Area unattended unless there was a major emergency, and if one had happened, he would have alerted the entire barracks to it as well as left someone at the CQ Desk to coordinate things.

Curious, I walked around behind the desk and opened the log to look for any reason for Jakes to abandon the CQ Desk. If the clocks on the wall were right (and they were all off between 5 and 15 minutes, consistent with the rumors that no two clocks in the barracks had the same time) Jakes had answered the phones when the eight ammo sites called about an hour and a half before, to let the unit know that they were all clear, but nothing else was written outside of the hourly checks from the FSTS sites, the hourly check-in with the MP unit on main post, hourly weather readings, and the hourly check with the V Corps NBC Liaison.

This was weird. The calls should have come in an hour before and been logged, there shouldn't have been an hour and a half, almost two hour gap. Something had pulled the entire CQ crew from the desk, when SOP stated that at least the ADD should have remained behind. If it was a serious emergency, the CQ should have woken up everyone behind while SPC-6 Jakes unlocked the arms room for us to gear up in full battle rattle.

Jakes would have followed SOP all the way, including alerting the next highest ranking in the barracks, which would have been me. My Corporal rank put me over the Specialists, and Jakes and I had worked together a few times, most recently during Reconstitution early in October, where his crew and mine had worked with 3rd Armor to reload vehicles as fast as possible in practice for the frantic loading that would take place during a Soviet invasion.

He hadn't woken me up, hadn't logged any disturbances, and that was strange.

Strange was dangerous.

The fact he had missed answering a call from the FSTS sites meant the MP's would have called the V Corps Liaison, and the MP's should have called the Ranger detachment down on main post and put them on standby. If the V Corps Liaison couldn't get a hold of us for more than 2 hours, the Rangers would be deployed to come up and either mount a rescue mission or assault any forces that had taken the unit. The timer should have been ticking.

It was a very real fear. We knew for a fact that the phones for our unit were tapped, both by our own side and the enemy. Twice, the Rangers had engaged special operations troops that were observing our unit. I'd heard about the short sharp clashes between the Rangers and Warsaw Pact special operations troops from the men who had taken part, drank the spirits of the men who died to the afterlife with them, and appreciated the fact that they'd protected us.

To everyone else, the Cold War was just NATO and the Warsaw Pact glaring at each other and making noise, rattling sabers, and muttering threats.

To us, it meant blackmail, surveillance, espionage, and even sabotage and combat.

Frustrated with the lack of information, I closed the logbook and turned around, checking the rest of the CQ area.

Parkas, cold weather masks, trigger mittens - all were laying on the table against the back wall. Four stacks on the table.

Shit.

If they'd gone outside they were dead already, and without their cold weather gear, as cold as it was getting in the barracks, two hours had a good chance of being fatal, even inside. Still swearing softly to myself, I dug out my keys before I walked to the back of the CQ area. I opened up "The Closet", where the breakers were and the weather readouts, and flicked the switch out of habit, getting nothing.

My flashlight revealed that all the gauges and dials were dead. Water pressure was about all we had, and the power had been out long enough that the water-heater temperature was down to about 50F. The outside temperature was well below freezing, wind speed was above 50MPH, humidity was bad, and the barometer was going south, dropping while I was watching.

Shit.

I went back out into the CQ and checked the phones. Three were dedicated lines, one to V Corps, one to the MP's, and the last to the Rangers. The other four lines were standard phone lines, used to make normal calls. The other lines were only for emergencies, as standard check-ins came over the normal phones.

All but one of them were dead, nothing but an echoing silence. The one dedicated Ranger line gave a steady crackling hiss that felt vaguely menacing and made the shaved hairs at the back of my neck try to stand up. The lizard hissed in rage.

I heard a low chuckle behind me and the door to The Closet slammed shut, making me jump.

Damn it. It's just nerves. This is the 1980's and I'm a soldier, not a Victorian maid.

I dug out the morning report from the middle drawer built into the CQ counter and crosschecked the names with room numbers in the alert roster. Only 13 of us in the barracks, the rest either lived off post or in on post housing. From the sheet, Jakes was the highest ranking according to the morning report from the day before, with me, Bomber, and Nagle coming in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, respectively.

Opening the rest of the drawers didn't turn up the keys, the vehicle dispatch, nothing that should have been there.

I checked the log again. Nothing about the Duty Driver or the ADD having to go somewhere. No emergencies. Only standard "All reports logged" and times, along with 1LT Jackson calling in that he was heading to Frankfurt but no reason why 1st Platoon's second section leader was leaving us without an officer against SOP. But then, LT Jackson had only gotten to the unit two months before, and in the week I'd been back to the unit I'd heard him wax poetically about how everything that had happened was either bullshit or how, if he'd been here when everything went up in flames, things would have turned out differently. He'd been angry to find out that a Second Lieutenant was in charge of a section of the platoon, while a First Lieutenant was in charge of the platoon, unlike a normal unit, where the only officer in a platoon was the Platoon Leader and usually a Second Lieutenant. Between his bullshit about how things would have been different and his griping about being relegated to being in charge of three squads instead of an entire platoon, he always had something to say about the unit, the SOP, and all of us, and usually none of it good.

He was a typical butter bar, thinking that ROTC had taught him how to live in Hell.

I sat down, lit a cigarette, and turned the chair so I could see the door outside, the double doors to the hallway and the stairwell door, plus I could see the clocks if I just turned my head instead of turning all the way around.

I'll give them 15 minutes...

It was almost 2AM.

Somewhere four men were wandering around.

Had they gone outside? Without their cold weather gear and outside in the weather that the gauges were reporting, they would be dead within minutes. When the hypothermia kicked in, they'd get confused and who knew how far they'd wander?

If they went outside, we'd find them in the spring, if ever. Last year, a guy had wandered outside into the snow and hadn't ever been found.

My cigarette finished before the 15 minutes went by and I opened the logbook, took a piece of paper out of the drawer, and wrote that I'd be back, I was checking the barracks, and if anyone needed anything, I'd be back before 3AM. I closed the logbook and set the paper on top of it, weighing it down with the pen and a dead 9 volt battery I found in one of the drawers before standing up.

I glanced outside, through the two sets of double doors, and saw nothing but white darkness.

Whiteout. Fuck.

That meant that there was a blizzard outside, with the wind driving the snow, which was probably mixed with the tiny ice crystals that formed snow seeds. That didn't mean it was dumping snow on us, either. The wind could be sweeping it all further down the mountain, piling it up below us while dropping only the barely minimum on us.

Or it could be about to drop fifteen feet of snow on the barracks.

The little lizard snarled at the idea of a blizzard trapping me here.

I hated the barracks. I begged, bribed, and threatened to get put on Temporary Duty Assignment (TDY), stay at site Atlas, or unit support for any random unit, rather than be back in the barracks. Nagle, Bomber, and I had managed to wheedle our way into field exercises or living at Atlas for over 9 months, only returning to the unit for an afternoon or maybe a weekend, here and there. My whole squad felt the same way, and were often grateful that we managed to avoid the barracks. If I wasn't at a field exercise or TDY, I preferred to stay out at the FSTS and away from the unit with my squad. Anything to avoid the barracks.

The shriek that echoed down the hallway, not even slightly muted by the double doors separating the CQ area from Titty Territory, reminded me why I'd rather be training C-DAT's how to inspect the 105mm APDSFSDU-T's and watching them to make sure they didn't lick the tank main gun rounds, stick them in any bodily orifices or only God knew what else.

I used my key to open up the dayroom, the rec-room, and the game room to find nobody inside. In the day room the TV was on, displaying only static, and through the windows I could see nothing but swirling white, with faint hints of something dark moving out there that I told myself was just my imagination. My hand shook a little as I turned the TV off and on, even tried turning the channels, but nothing changed. The TV stayed on, and only showed static.

I hated it when it did that, but our XO had told us that it had to do with built up charge and the heavy static electricity in the air during storms.

In other words, he fed us a line of bullshit to explain something that didn't make sense.

I gave the TV the finger and left the day-room, heading for the game room. In the game room, the video games were dark and silent as I swept my light over them, the frost glittering on everything. In the rec room I could see that the pool tables were clear of sticks or pool balls, the foosball tables, shuffleboard tables, and the air hockey tables were silent and waiting. The tile floors gleamed in the light from my flashlight, with no black marks or scuffmarks on the polished wax, mutely giving evidence that nobody had been inside since the guys on CQ had polished the floors with a buffer earlier in the evening.

Once I'd made sure each room was clear, I hit the light switches to kill the lights out of long-ingrained habit and then closed and relocked the doors. I stood in the middle of the CQ area for a long moment, staring at the trophy case that took up most of one wall, not seeing the trophies the unit had earned over the last year, but steeling my courage for the last place that needed to be checked out.

Taking a few deep breaths, I went in and checked the unisex bathroom, despite the lizard's hiss of warning.

It was ice cold inside, the sinks and stalls still looking like nobody had ever used them. There was dust on the sinks, and the floor tiles were dull with no black streaks from soldier's boots on them. Nobody had been in there for weeks, months, maybe not since the building was rebuilt.

Another scream sounded out from behind me and I shivered and retreated, ashamed that I was shivering from more than the cold after being in that bathroom.

...the last place anyone had seen Tandy before ARTEP...

I half expected to see his shaving kit still open on the sink.

The double doors between the CQ area and the first half of the ground floor hallway screamed when I pushed my way through them. The scream was distinctive. I could tell the difference between the screams the doors made and the screams that echoed through the air with no known source. My flashlight beam danced around, sparkling on the frost that covered the walls. The sign next to the double doors in the CQ Area had a training bra hanging from it, with the words "You must be this big to live in Titty Territory", that some of the female soldiers had put up. Even when it was torn down by officers or NCO's who didn't appreciate the humor they put it back up. I stepped through the doorway and let the doors shriek as they closed behind me.

Just before they closed, I heard the pitter patter of a little girl's tap shoes in the hallway, behind.

I ignored the sound and so did the lizard.

My breath plumed out in front of me as I walked down the hallway of Titty Territory, my boots thudding as I watched for ice patches on the buffed tiles. SGT Swope had slipped on ice in the hallway a week ago and broken her elbow. I was an invader in Titty Territory, and my mind whispered to me that if the barracks would break Sergeant Swope's elbow when she left her room, it would do far worse to an interloper like me. The frost didn't cover the murals that some of the female soldiers had painted on the walls. On the right hand wall a mural of female soldiers engaged in a firefight with silhouetted enemies hadn't been finished, and the eyes staring at me from the female soldier's faces gave me the willies.

I stopped outside Nagle's room and knocked on the door. It took a few minutes and a few more knocks, but Nagle answered, wrapped in a nightgown, fuzzy robe and a blanket, with her fuzzy bunny slippers poking out from under it, wearing a look that combined irritation and sleepiness. Her sleep mussed long brown hair, slightly curly, cascaded down her back and framed her long face. She was blinking in the light from my flashlight, her brown eyes drowsy. The lizard perked up at the sight of her, his fingers caressing the 'breed' button.

"What the fuck do you want, Ant?" She part snarled, part yawned. "Go beat off, I'm sleeping." It was her typical answer whenever I knocked on her door and she wasn't expecting me. It sounded harsh, but her gentle tone robbed it of any sting.

The sight of her made a warmth spread in my chest, and the lizard purr, but I ignored it, cursing my weakness at needing her so much.

"CQ crew is gone, can't find them, power's down." I told her. She was used to the way I spoke, having known me from when I didn't talk unless it was necessary. It hadn't been uncommon for me to go days without speaking unless I had to give orders, ask questions, or pass on information. Even though I talked more than I had when she'd first met me, I still didn't talk that much.

"Go away, don't care." She answered, yawning again, and went to slam her door, but instead bounced it off my boot. She glanced down at where I'd stuck my foot in her doorway and then looked back up, her expression surprised. I usually didn't push things.

"Get dressed, Nancy, I'm gonna grab Bomber." I smiled and held up my keyring, "Don't make me come in there." She glared at me for a second, then nodded. "Me and Bomber will meet you in the CQ Area."

"Why me? Can't you just do a sweep by yourself?" She grumbled. "For Christ's sake, stuff your tampon in and go handle it."

I waved one hand at the dark barracks. "You know just as well as I do that this place will kill us if it gets a chance." I told her. "I'm not doing this alone. Not here." I didn't give her a chance to reply, instead turning and walking away. "This place hates us and wants us to die." I tossed over my shoulder.

She grumbled behind me before she closed the door. I heard the lock get thrown, the metallic snap loud in the silence. I knew I could trust her to do what I'd told her to do. Yeah, I outranked her, but that didn't much matter to Nancy. Her attitude may have bothered some people, but not me. She was reliable and, despite her bitching, I knew she'd do what needed to be done. That's what mattered to me.

Through the double doors between Titty Territory and Queer Country, I take a left through the center stairwell access door, up a flight of stairs, take another left, and head toward the end of the hallway.

Ignore the screams. Ignore the sobs. Ignore the cold chill down the back.

God, I want a drink.

I didn't bother knocking on Bomber's door, I just used my key to unlock it and walked in.

When everyone else had moved into the barracks, I'd been assigned to get the vehicles and drive them back to the unit. Vehicles that were either shipped from Stateside to Bremerhaven Naval Harbor or turned over to us from other units in Germany. I'd spent the entire month and a half during that time sleeping in vehicles or in the barracks of whatever unit had turned over the vehicles to us. When I'd gotten back, for some reason, they'd handed me a key for my room which turned out to be a master key. You named it in the barracks, my key opened it, if it wasn't a secure area with a heavy security door and locks. I should have turned it in, I should have reported it, but for some reason, I kept it.

A little girl's giggle floated down the hallway from the darkness as I walked into his room.

...you're not real, go away...

The door shut behind me as I moved through the little hallway, the bathroom door and one set of wall lockers on my right, two sets of wall lockers on my left, and into the main living space of Bomber's room. There was a set of bunk beds, made up with hospital corners and with OD green wool blankets, a single bed, three three-drawer chests, two dressers, two desks, and a refrigerator in the room. On the walls were rodeo trophies, country music posters, and other knick-knacks of Bomber's life in the military.

My blond haired, blue eyed, bull-riding friend was asleep in his bed, his six foot two frame thick with muscle gained the same way mine had been: Hand carrying two hundred pound artillery shells, all day, for months on end. Bomber was curled up under his blankets on the single bed, so I just walked over, grabbed the edge and whipped the covers off of him.

Due to the elevation we were at in the German Alps, personnel in 2/19th were required to be extreme cold weather survival certified by order of the Post Commander. Before you could move into the barracks, you had to attend the class. You learned how to survive in the cold, and one of the most important parts was how you slept. While a person is sleeping, they have a tendency to sweat. That sweat can create ice between the blanket layers, in the sleeping bag, or on top of your blankets or fart sack, so you had to sleep in a simple way.

Naked.

And Bomber was sucking his thumb, like always.

"Get the Hell up, you Texas retard!" I yelled at him, throwing the blankets back on top of him in order to spare my eyes any more full view of Texas.

"Huh? Wuzzup?" His Texas accent and sleep blurred his speech.

"CQ crew is missing, power's out, phones are dead." I told him, walking over to his refrigerator and pulling out a beer.

He sat up, wrapping the blanket around him. He summed up his opinion pretty quick with a single curse word. He stretched, his back popping. "Nagle?"

"Dressing." I twisted the top off of the Tucher hefe weissen beer and tossed the cap into the garbage. "She'll meet us in the CQ Area."

"You got a bad feeling?" He asked me, as he swung his legs off the bed and his feet hit the floor. He winced as his feet touched the cold tiles, but he was like me, used to it. I lowered the beer bottle and nodded. "Got a plan?" He walked slowly toward his desk, once skidding slightly as he hit a frozen patch on the floor.

"Yup." I knew he wouldn't be looking at me, paying more attention to making it across his room without busting his ass as his body heat melted the thin layer of ice on the floor.

"How bad off are we?" He asked me, grabbing his keys out of the desk drawer and heading for his wall lockers. I moved over to the window, opening the curtains to reveal nothing but white and the hint of dark shapes in the snow.

"Bad. July bad." I told him, referring to four bloody hours one night out at Atlas that nobody who wasn't there or didn't have to cover up the incident or hide the reports would ever know or care about, except the families of the dead."

"Sitrep?" He asked me to give him a situation report, tell him what I'd observed.

I filled him in on what I had and hadn't seen in the clipped, quick, acronym filled jargon that we were both familiar with. He cursed, both at the situation and me, but he didn't refuse to come with me, just bitched and called me a chickenshit for not doing it all by myself. It didn't bother me being called that by him, even though from anyone but him or Nancy would have started a fight. We were friends, even though he was abandoning me.

While he dressed I stood and looked out the window, enjoying the taste of the beer. It was nothing but swirling thick white snow outside the glass. If it wasn't dumping snow on main post already, it was going to smash the fuck out of them within a few hours and dump several feet of it on them. The ski resort would be thrilled with all the powder, the ski resort below us, above main post, and in between us.

We were cut off and isolated.

...again...

The last time we had been cut off, the barracks had burnt down, several people had died, and Tandy had come up missing. My brother had almost died charging back into the barracks to rescue his friend Cobb, taking a shard of glass into his knee and suffering first degree burns on his head and forearms. I'd been injured too, Hell, we'd all been injured. We'd driven two CUC-V Chevy Blazers down the mountain in a blizzard, twenty of us crammed into the vehicles, several of us burned, a couple of us bleeding. Broken glass had cut my forehead and forearms, and I had burns across my back from where my T-Shirt had caught on fire when the fire had backblasted into the room I was trying to get through to get out the door. The burns had made the drive one of pure agony as I'd nursed the CUC-V through the snow, barely able to see, and having to slow down more than once and rely on someone standing in front of the vehicle, walking along the road to make sure we didn't drive off the cliff.

Now we were cut off again.

"Ready to go?" Bomber asked me. I turned around and he was replacing the batteries in his flashlight, taking the batteries out of the tinfoil and paper they were individually wrapped in. It was a habit we'd picked up in 2/19th. He was wearing Levi jeans, his insulated heavy work boots, a flannel shirt, and his Levi jacket. He was holding up my Levi jacket that I'd left in his room a few nights before. When I nodded after tossing the beer bottle, empty except for the little residue that nobody ever drank, into the garbage can, he tossed it to me.

"The whole barracks is frozen over." I told him, shrugging into the jacket and buttoning it up quickly. It made me a little warmer, but not much, even the heavy fleece lining was no match for the cold that had seeped into the barracks once the power went down.

"We gotta get the generators going, or we won't last a Texas minute." Bomber grunted, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "Think we should put on our gear?" He asked, referring to our extreme cold weather gear.

"Naw, we'll be quick and knock this shit out. We'll get the generators fired up and get the radiators pumping out heat in a Stuttgart minute." I told him. He grinned at me as he opened the door and waved me through.

We left his room, Bomber locking it behind us, and the two of us ignoring the shriek of agony that echoed down the hallway as the wind swept around us for a moment. The ice had spread on the walls, glittering now from the floors and the drop ceiling.

"How long do you think the power's been out?" Bomber asked me. I shrugged. "Make a fucking guess, man." His voice sounded irritated.

"No more than two hours. Otherwise it would have been noted in the CQ log." I told him, remembering that there was no mention of power interruptions listed in it.

"It's gotta be bad out there." Bomber commented, waving one hand at the ice that was almost visibly spreading on the walls. I nodded as we kept walking down the hallway. The emergency light was little more than a suggestion of a glow, the lamps on top of the box a dark crimson. When we pushed through the middle door, the frozen hinges screamed and the wind swirled around us for a moment before the heavy springs pulled the doors back into place with a metallic twanging.

Above us, someone shouted in German and it sounded like boots crashed as a group of people jumped out their chairs and to attention.

We ignored it and the lizard didn't even bother to open one eye.

There was nothing else we could do.

The CQ area stairwell was cold, the wind swirling around us. The sound of a woman sobbing could be heard, coming from the darkness, below, as we carefully moved down the steps. I lost my balance once, but Bomber steadied me, keeping me from going head first down the stairs. The door to the CQ area was heavy and I had to put my shoulder into it to get it to open.

Nagle was waiting for us, her flashlight in her hand, picking up the phones, listening, and slamming them down. Her expression showed me that she was angry and disgusted at the situation we'd found ourselves in.

"How the fuck did our dedicated lines go down?" She asked, holding out the dedicated V Corps line at me, accusingly.

The dedicated lines ran to main post; the cables were wrapped in foam, then in foil, an insulator, copper mesh, then inside inch thick PVC pipes that were then buried at least a foot into the ground. By all rights, there should have been nothing short of a nuclear weapon able to knock them out, and then only if the line itself got damaged by the burst. The line would have to take a direct hit for them to go out. Maybe an earth shift would snap the line or a close enough penetrator artillery round would destroy the line itself...

Or sabotage.

It was 0248, the log book was unchanged, the cold weather gear was still there, and the clocks were still ticking away. The amount of time they were all off had shifted, but that was normal. The two alarm clocks in my room, owned by my roommate and me, all kept different times no matter how many times we reset them.

"What do we do, Ant?" Bomber asked, rubbing his hands together. All of us were in jackets, Nagle wore her favorite goosedown jacket, but it was getting colder in the barracks and the chill was starting to soak into our bones.

"First things first, we see if we can get the generators fired up." I told them.

Straight out of the handbook.

They both nodded, following me as I pushed through the doors to Titty Territory. The frost had grown from patches here and there on the walls and floor to a sheath covering the entire hallway, drinking the light from our flashlights and making it so that the lights did nothing to banish the darkness that felt like it was pressing in on us.

We hit the middle stairwell and went down a level to the basement, the darkness seeming to get thicker as we went. My flashlight started to dim, the beam getting more and more yellow the further down the steps we went. Nancy's flashlight flickered a few times and then dimmed down to almost nothing. Our footsteps sounded muffled. The wind had managed to slither into the stairwell and pluck at us with icy fingers.

Out of habit I glanced back under the stairs to check the heavy armored door that led to the Warfighter Tunnels. An underground complex dug out of the mountainside, based on old Nazi tunnels that had been discovered after the barracks had burnt down, the Warfighter Tunnels were designed to let us wait out a nuclear hit, establish communications to coordinate any NBC response, as well as holding barracks, secondary armories, a medical area, and a chowhall. It had taken the engineers almost six months to refit the Nazi tunnels, and the entrance to the Warfighter Tunnels beneath our barracks was a two foot thick door that looked like it belonged on a bank safe. I'd seen the tunnels, built in the 1930's by the German military, and I had to admit that they had been impressive. There had even been two U-Boat engines that had been installed to provide the small complex with power.

I turned from the heavy steel doors, weighing in my mind whether or not we'd be able to pull back to the War Fighter tunnels if things got too bad for us. I didn't know the door codes, nobody below the position of Section Sergeant was supposed to know. I made a mental note to find out the codes, by hook or by crook, if I survived whatever was going on.

The door barracks maintenance room was closed, covered in frost, and neither Nancy nor Bomber said anything about me sweeping my light across it quickly, checking the edges of the door for wires. When Bomber tried the door, where the furnaces and water heaters were located, he found it locked.

We needed to get to the generator room, which was down in what used to be the sub-basement, and we had to access it by going into the furnace/water heater room. The original barracks had gone three levels down, and rumor control had it that when they'd excavated the bottom level they'd found bodies of dead Jews, victims of SS training techniques, thrown into a mass grave at the bottom of the building.

Bomber moved aside and I moved to unlock the door, hanging my L-shaped military issue flashlight from my Levi jacket pocket by its clip. When I dug my keys out of my pocket my flashlight went dead. Bomber and Nagle waited for me to switch the batteries in it before we opened the door. Before the barracks had burned down the previous winter I'd learned the lesson: Never go anywhere in the building without extra batteries. Always store the batteries wrapped in paper and then wrap the batteries with tinfoil.

It took a lot of effort to pull open the door to the maintenance and storage area. The door was at least six inches thick, made of steel, with a concrete core. The whole barracks was designed like that, brute force to resist a near nuclear hit. Thick cinderblock walls, reinforced with steel rebars and the holes in the cinderblocks filled with concrete. The outside walls were a foot thick, the interior walls six inches, the room doors steel cored, the windows double-paned, and the stairs designed to flex, each step separate from the others, held together by a steel lattice.

As soon as the door cracked open the stench wafted over us: Rotting meat and blood, the reek of decay so thick you could taste it. There was no reason for it, but it was a feature of the maintenance and storage area, and sometimes during the summer a few of the rooms in Queer Country had the same smell. Nobody lived in those rooms during those times, even though people were assigned to them. Like most of us, the soldiers in Queer Country preferred to double and triple up rather than stay in their rooms alone, and the stench was as good a reason as any to abandon a room you'd been assigned to. The vents had all been checked repeatedly, there was no reason for it, but the stench still remained.

Rumor control had it that it was the bodies that had been excavated under the building.

We moved into the huge room. The ceiling was fifteen feet above us, with conduits of wiring, pipes for water and sewage snaking across it. The fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling were dark and silent, the light and almost subliminal buzzing noise absent as we moved into the room, sweeping our flashlights around.

The little lizard was wide awake and alert, pushing my spatial awareness out, and I felt the cool chill of adrenaline down my spine as it lightly pushed on the combat button.

The massive hot water heaters sat silently against the left hand wall, at about the center of the room. Three huge oil tanks squatted between the water heaters and the half-dozen silent furnaces. The room felt claustrophobic, despite the size - all bare unpainted concrete, reinforced concrete that felt like it was pressing in on you. Pallets of canvas covered war-stock lined the far side of the room, and the door to the stairwell to the sub-basement was at the halfway point, across the room from the oil tanks. The war-stock had everything our unit needed to be able to roll out and fight when the Russians pushed into the Fulda Gap. Sleeping bags, canteens, web-gear (LBE's), rucksacks; basically the TA-50 we were already issued. The war-stocks made sure that we'd have all the equipment we needed no matter what.

"We should have stayed at Atlas." Nagle bitched, breaking the silence. "I'm so cold my fucking nipples are going to fall off." The echo was muted, but present, making her voice sound weird. The fact that the echoes faded into barely heard whispers that stayed present was something we ignored.

It wasn't anything new.

I grinned at her, motioning at my two friends to wait for me. Nancy nodded, blowing on her hands and rubbing them together to warm them up. Bomber kept his hands in his jacket pockets, his teeth chattering slightly. I quickly moved to the switch boxes and moved the big handle switches from external to internal power, then came back. We bitched for a few minutes about how cold it was, walking over to the door and quickly unlocking it. When I hauled the door opened, the smell washed over us, even thicker.

Decay.

All of the basements on the far side of the building always smelled like there was something dead down there, and no matter how much time had passed, no matter how well it was searched with nothing found, it always smelled like death. The sub-basement we'd just opened up was the worst, smelling like a dead deer I'd found one summer, and usually the stench conjured up the mental image of maggots swarming in black and greasy rotted meat.

My brain summoned up the image of dead women and children this time.

All three of us pulled our flashlights off our pockets, the snap of the metal clips hitting the plastic body of the flashlights loud in the silence, and shined the light into the stairs. The darkness of the stairwell swallowed the light and gave nothing but the faint sparkle of frost in return. We looked at one another when a low moan of pain drifted up the stairs, shrugged, and as one put our flashlights back onto our pockets. The bulb was on the short end of the L-shaped flashlight, and the way it was designed meant that the clip would keep it hanging from a pocket or a soldier's Load Bearing Equipment, with the beam shining forward.

The darkness still swallowed up the light.

We went down the stairs carefully, holding onto the bannister, unconsciously clustering together despite the fact that the military had hammered into us to avoid clustering up. If you were clustered up, a single grenade or burst of enemy fire could take you out.

The cold and darkness were far more old and hardwired than just training.

When we reached the landing I faced the door to the generator room, ignoring the other three doors in the short hallway. All of them led to rooms that contained additional war stocks for use in the barracks that had to be kept in secured areas: NVG's, additional weapons, Kevlar body armor and Kevlar helmets, heavy weapons, radios, code equipment, computers in EMP shielded boxes, whatever we needed to fight a war if our primary stocks were damaged.

The METL stated that if it ever went to verified war with the Soviet Union and we had the time, we were supposed to draw everything from war stocks instead of using our standard issued gear. That way the equipment would have less of a chance of failure, and we'd have every piece of equipment we needed.

We all knew that if the balloon went up, there wasn't much chance that we'd have time to do anything more than grab our issue and our rucks and move fast. More than likely the building and the war stocks inside would get destroyed. Instead, we'd probably have to rely on what we'd grabbed from our issue and what was inside the Warfighter Tunnels.

My key fit smoothly in the lock to the generator room, and I unlocked it, staring at the stenciled legend "EMERGENCY POWER" on the door that was covered in a layer of ice that might have started as frost before it thickened into real ice.

According to the inventory sheets beside the door, the generator room contained four 5K generators and two 60K generators. Six fuel tanks were outside the building to provide fuel during the summer, two down in the sub-basement with the generators, eight tanks inside the building to provide fuel for the water heaters and the central heating units. Like the oil tanks, they were inside the building to prevent slurry or freezing in the pipes or lines as well as being secured to protect them from any damage from any surgical strike against our unit.

Bomber checked the security log book before he dropped the cover and shook his head. "Nobody's checked this tonight." I nodded, snorting with a mixture of amusement and disgust. It was pretty much par for the course that nobody bothered to check the sub-basement during the night, just went in and signed the whole sheet at once toward the end of the night so you wouldn't have to put up with the smell and the cold. I knew that whoever I had been on CQ with had always told me to just make sure the door was locked and then sign off on the log, if they even sent me down to make the check during the night.

"We'll fire up the generators, then sweep the barracks and see if we can find Jakes and the others." I said. Bomber grunted and Nagle just nodded, shivering. She had her hands in her armpits to try to keep them warm, and I made a mental note to swing by our rooms and grab our gloves before we lost fingernails to frostbite.

I pulled open the door to the generator room, already thinking about what order I'd need to fire them up. I was looking forward to getting first the generators and then the water heaters and furnaces running. My brain ticked through that the water heaters needed to be priority, since living areas were heated via radiators, and the oil furnaces would be used to warm up the rest of the big ass building via forced air. At the rate the temperature was dropping, we'd need to wake everyone up, or at least check on them, and make sure we didn't have any cold weather casualties.

I flashed my light into the room while thinking over the steps I'd need to take.

The cables that led into the ceiling or walls glimmered, black under the frost. The fuel tanks sat solidly, full of diesel fuel, coated in frost. The set of double doors that led to the hallway which allowed access to the loading dock looked like they were frozen shut. The chain looked like it had been coated with pixie dust by Tinker Bell.

And no generators.

The smell of decay had rolled over the three of us, Nagle gagging.

"What the fuck?" Bomber said, then coughed from the stench.

The lizard hissed in hatred, its instincts sure that it was all a trap.

A scream ripped down the stairwell behind us, the door flying open, crashing against the wall, and then slamming shut.