2/19th SWG Barracks
2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
28 October, 1987
0620

It stared at me from the red ruined eye. Cold, merciless intellect handed down through millions of years. Curled up in the brainstem of a two hundred pound killing machine forged in hatred out of the wreckage of a human being. Six feet of Army built combatacon, designed to fight and win on the nuclear battlefield, no longer run by cognitive functions of a human brain but instead the killer instinct of a small reptile brain the size of a nickle. For a long moment we locked gazes, and I could swear I felt something twist and move at the base of my skull.

Sergeant Stillwater blinked. Just his right eye. The left eye, the sclera red with blood, even the iris full of blood, just stared at me. My brain said it was a blink. His right eye was empty, not soulless, but the brain, the intellect, that should have shown through that eye was gone.

During my career I had walked the streets of Pripyat, put tourniquet a compression severed leg, been shot through the stomach by a Russian doctor, and survived the man-made hell of Special Weapons Medical Training. I had seen and done terrible things, been through the horror of combat, which was fit for neither man nor beast.

Staring at my team leader, it took everything I had, standing in that cold and dark hallway, not to scream in terror.

Behind me I could hear the two men trying to get up and I silently willed them to lay down and play dead, to act as if I had already killed them before that tiny little chunk of gray matter in my Sergeant's brain identified them as targets and terminated them with extreme prejudice.

I was holding my breath. Stripped to the waist, my body nothing but burning agony, my sweat freezing to my skin, the knife in my hand slowly becoming frozen to my flesh as the blood that covered my fist from the man I had stabbed turned to frost and ice.

My life was poised on the single heartbeat that seemed to take forever.

It was impossible for a single heartbeat, in a body fueled by panic and terror, to take so long.

Stillwater turned around, a perfect about face, and stepped away.

The frozen moment broke.

I whirled around as the shadows wrapped around him, putting him out of my mind, my eyes catching the two men as they stood up. I blinked, and frozen tears on my eyelids broke away, taking my eyelashes with them.

One spit blood on the floor, but I didn't look, I kept my eyes locked with theirs.

"Gonna wish we killed you, bitch," The one on the right sneered.

"Gonna cornhole you good," The other threatened.

I clenched my jaw, watching their eyes, watching their balance. Stillwater had tasked Stokes, the massive Amazonian martial arts expert, to teach us all close quarters combat, following it up with his own lessons on knife fighting.

I was strong, freakishly strong for a woman, slightly above average for a man my height and weight, with fast reflexes honed and trained at Atlas, but if I let those two set the pace of the fight they'd finish me fast.

The one on the right started to blink, his eyes narrowing as his muscles came into play. The one of the left was reaching down with his left hand to grab his own crotch in an unspoken threat, his left hand slightly back to keep his balance on the frost-slicked floor.

...don't let your opponent set the pace, seize the initiative, act don't react...

Stokes' voice.

The blade went in smoothly under the sternum of the guy on the left, my left hand bunching up the front of his uniform in my fist to yank him against me, then shove him back, off of the knife, away from me, pulling his knife out of my side, feeling it grate along my hip-bone, and I pivoted, my left hand reaching back out to my next foe.

The guy on my right was turning to face me, his face showing that he wasn't quite sure what was happening. Still, his fist was coming at me. No time to dodge, nothing fancy, just turn my head slightly and take it.

His fist felt like a sledgehammer as it hit the left hand hinge of my jaw.

...too little...

My hand bunched into his uniform and I tried to yank him toward me, but instead his mass and the fact his feet were set pulled me at him as he smiled at the feeling of his fist crashing into my jaw.

...too late...

No finesse, no real training, just one of the prime lessons Stillwater had put into us.

...go full offense if there's no other way to win..

I threw myself on him, stabbing, pushing him backwards. Our feet tangled, his head bounced off the tile, the top of my head hit the wall, I was still stabbing, slamming the blade home as fast as possible. He screamed, blood gouting out of his mouth at the end of the scream and he choked and gagged as I kept stabbing. He tried rolling me over, whether calculated or out of instinct to get away from the raw agony I kept slamming into whatever parts of his body I could reach, I didn't know.

The cold floor had stripped the skin from my back, the blood had already frozen with the sweat. A strip off the side of my breast peeled away as we rolled and my back pressed against the tile, but I kept stabbing, instinct not purpose rotated the knife in my hand and I started stabbing up his side, kicking and screaming my rage as he managed to put his fist into my face.

He was dying, he goddamn well knew it, but like some men in the military, he would take me with him. He managed to straddle me as I stabbed his guts.

I'd made a mistake. Stabbed him so deep, so often, that the circuit breaker in his pain center had kicked on and his system was flooded with combat chemicals to let him fight past the mortal wounds, to take me with him. He started punching me repeatedly in the face as I kept stabbing him. Something under my eye snapped. My nose flattened and crunched. Two of my teeth broke off and I gagged on the blood.

But I kept stabbing.

My knife found something inside of him finally. He pissed himself, the urine covering my stomach, running down my sides, freezing my flesh to floor as he just collapsed on top of me.

I stabbed him three more times before I realized it was over.

I left the knife in his side and let my arms fall to my sides. They were covered in blood, which immediately froze to the tile.

It was so cold the condensation from my breath was freezing on my bloody lips. I coughed, turning my head to the side so I could spit. Teeth and blood. One of the teeth skipped out of the wad of blood and danced across the floor. Blood ran out of the corner of my mouth and froze on the tile.

The side of my face was frozen to the floor.

I was shivering, the floor leeching my core warmth, the sweat on my body turning to ice. My limbs were going numb, burning with pain before slowly ebbing away and vanishing. Heat was flowing from my hip, down to my butt cheek, freezing through the cloth, sticking me to the floor. The wound slowed, the wound freezing shut.

It would be so easy to lay here. Lay on the floor and just let go.

Just let go.

Just relax.

Stop fighting.

Let it happen.

It came from deep inside me. It lit a fire, rage filling me, and I screamed my hatred into the man's dead face, ripping my arms free of the frozen blood, pulling on his left side and pushing on his right, rolling his dead weight off of me. I used his momentum to roll with him, up onto my knees and elbows. I coughed, spitting blood onto the floor.

I started crawling, coughing, screaming in rage still, forcing my numb and abused body to keep going, keep crawling. Someone shouted back in German above me and boots crashed to the floor, causing chips of ice and flakes of frost to shower down from the ceiling, coating me. The emergency lights in the middle of the hallway snapped on, dim red light hiding the blood that was dripping from my mouth, from the cuts on my face, as I crawled, on my hands and knees, down that frozen hallway.

Something tore in my throat, but I still kept screaming out words of hatred, words of rage.

Born to Fight!

Keep crawling, bitch, you can make it.

Trained to Kill!

The door was open still, crawl through the doorway, don't go straight, do a slow one eighty.

Willing to Die.

No. No I am not. Take a right. My elbow gave out and my face slammed into the porcelain bottom. I pushed myself up, the porcelain slick and cold under my hands.

My left pinky was bent wrong, snapped sometime during that desperate fight.

But Never Will.

Scrabbling at the tile wall, almost instinctively, blind now, unable to see either due to darkness or my body's internal systems failing, I managed to grab the handles and start turning them.

FINISH THE FIGHT!

The water was cold at first, and even though I could barely feel anything but the agony in my guts I managed to get it adjusted to as hot as I could stand it.

I was in the shower, in Stillwater's room, sliding down the wall to curl up at the bottom of the shower. I pushed my pants off, pushed the long johns off, pushed my panties off, and curled up naked on the bottom of the shower. It was indented four inches, the water slicing at my freezing skin like it was flaying me alive.

...I won't pass out, I won't pass out, I won't pass out...

Putting my feet on the tile wall I rolled on my back, opening my legs, letting the water hit my inner thighs, my crotch, my belly, my breasts.

I started shivering as I became aware of how cold I was. Steam was billowing around me, I managed to pull the shower curtain closed.

My fingers left bloody smears on the plastic that washed away as I stared. My right eye was swelling shut, my vision was doubled, and my hip was full of pain from where that one guy got a piece of me with the knife I had missed. My fingers found the wound. It was small, about an inch and a half long, the edges clean, but with the water I couldn't tell how badly it was bleeding.

The feeling had returned to my fingers. They felt like sausages of pain, but I ignored it, reaching out of the shower for my pants. I found my BDU bottoms and fumbled for a moment, keeping pressure on the wound with my right hand, my left searching blindly for the pocket of my pants. My fingers crabbed inside of the pocket and found what I was looking for.

The mini-aid kit that Nancy had taught all of us medics to pack.

...I didn't have it when I needed it and men died who might have lived...

Her voice was solemn, full of unhealed pain as it wound through my brain.

My hands, which were attached to me but running on instinct, moved of their own volition. Training took over as I pulled a curved suture needle out of the small kit, as I pulled silk thread from the package.

...Margaret, 3.0 silk...

Hawkeye Pierce's voice from M*A*S*H.

My hands trembled and I bit the inside of my mouth as hard as I could, the pain focusing me, and I slipped the thin end through the eye of the needle.

...each of these animals have sustained hits from a Soviet AK-47 combat rifle. you will not be permitted gas masks in this chemical environment. you will treat these patients and will be graded pass/fail on whether or not they survive to reach the aid station...

Instructor Gutierrez's voice, from the Battlefield Surgery course. I could smell the CS gas and HC smoke that had filled the area, hear the screaming of the wounded goats and pigs as I moved as fast as possible.

The first was a goat. Belly wound, intestines compromised, organs outside the body. Expectant. Move on. Second was another goat. Gunshot to the right flank, trying to get up. Sedate. Stitch. Pick up. Carry.

My hands moved to the stab wound on my hip.

Second was a pig. Facial hit. Eye destroyed. Exited from the roof of the mouth. Sedate. Work. Quickly, quickly, every second counts.

The needle pushed into my skin.

Third was a goat, broken leg. Crying now. Animal screams sound like humans. I'm back at Atlas. Pulling open a friend's guts. Blast ruptured spleen.

First stitch.

My grandmother's omelette tasted good as I took a bite.

Second stitch.

Riding the merry-go-round, the music bright and tinkling. My grand-mother smiling.

...you're never too old for the merry-go-round, Heather my love...

Third stitch.

Sitting on the park bench, at the State Fair, next to my grandmother, who was looking at the merry-go-round we had just ridden with a smile.

Fourth stitch.

Reaching over to take my grand-mother's hand. The was she slumped against me. Her eyes still open, the smile still on her face.

Fifth stitch.

Holding her and crying as people tried to help. Too late.

Always too late.

Tie it off, let the needle fall.

I was crying.

Heavy footfalls. Combat boots. Someone large.

Pain. My fat butt was covering the drain. The two inch deep water was bloody.

The door to the room shut.

...grammy...

The boots thudded into the bathroom.

I stared at the ceiling of the shower, almost lost in the steam.

The bathroom door shut.

The room got warmer.

The taste of blackberries ripened in the summer sun. The smell of Grammy's blackberry cobbler fresh from the oven.

The sound of weight settling on the toilet.

The feel of my quilt against my skin.

A weird sucking noise. Glass? Something. A gurgle. The snap of a lighter. Smell of cigarette smoke.

I looked over at the shower curtain as it was swept aside.

Stillwater sat on the toilet, bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand, cigarette in the other.

He had a field dressing wound around his head, the padded part over his left eye. He looked at me as he took a drag off his cigarette.

"Gonna live?" He asked me, blowing smoke out.

"Go fuck yourself," I snarled.

He just laughed.

The bastard.