2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
30 October, 1987
0100 Hours

The ice axe hit with a solid thunk that sent a shock up my arm and made my shoulder flare with pain. The guy went backwards as I let it go, knowing it was hung up on bone by the way it had shuddered going into him. I'd felt his ribs go as the serrated curve has tore between two of them, spreading them out and shattering them.

No time to get to the pistols. No time to get to the knife.

WARNING! AUTONOMOUS COMBAT SYSTEMS OFFLINE! WARNING!

I was already in with them. One was turning to stare at his friend, the one in the back started screaming, catching his friend as his friend went down, the third looking straight at me, his face confused.

"What?" He started.

The lizard slammed his fists on the board, trying to activate his combat routines, trying to get his decision matrixes up and running. Nothing was working for him as I made my decisions in a split second, decisions he didn't approve of.

No time for anything fancy.

I gave the one on my right a short, sharp clothesline, stepping into him, hooking my foot behind his, and slamming the crook of my arm into his face. He went down as I was still turning. The guy in the rear's feet slipped on the ice as he took his dead friend's weight and both started going down.

"Are you doing?" The one on the left got out as I finished my turn, the cleats biting into the ice both outside the door and inside. I palmed his face, put my hips into it, and slammed the back of his head against the door frame as hard as I could. Something in my shoulder groaned at the force of it.

Blood smeared his face and my palm as I let go and turned back to the one that had just hit the ground. One of his eyes was still open, but rolled back. If he was still alive, I'd handle it in a minute. The one of the ground was stunned still, his arms up in front of him, wrists limp.

I stomped on the middle of his face with the my right combat boot, the cleats shredding his flesh. I stomped again, and something crunched under my foot.

My left leg took that as a sign we were done and folded underneath me.

The guy at the rear managed to throw his buddy off of him as I used the door frame to pull myself up, roaring in pain and rage as my knee tried to buckle again.

He ran.

"COME BACK, I'M NOT DONE HURTING YOU!" I bellowed at him, tensing to prepare to chase him down and kill him.

Westlin appeared in front of me, wearing full battle rattle, her LBE unbuckled and her vest pulled open. Around the hole in her T-shirt was stained with dark blood, and it ran from the corners of her mouth and her nose.

"No, Ant, stay on mission," She snapped.

I checked my run.

"It isn't happy fun kill time, Ant," Westlin said, pointing at the door. "Get to work."

I grinned under my mask as I moved by her, back out. I pulled each body back around the corner, then set to work.

She was right. Let the guy run.  I needed him to run.

Last two. Set them in the snow, run the wires, move inside, let the door almost close, hook up the wires.

"Better hurry, Ant, they'll be coming soon," Westlin told me.

"I know," I said, moving up the stairs.

"Got a plan?" She asked me when I sat down on the stairs above the landing in between the second and third floors.

"Yup," I told her. I needed to catch my breath. My chest was hurting and a quick sip off the O2 didn't seem to help. My knee was screaming fire, and the lizard was still pissed as hell. I could feel a steady headache at the base of my skull starting.

He was throwing a shit-fit at being cut out of the decision loops.

"What's the plan," She asked me.

"You don't wanna know," I told her, standing up. I started moving slowly to minimize the noise from my knee as I climbed the stairs. When I got to the third floor I slowly moved down to the first inhabited room, being careful. Last thing I needed was to get ambushed. I undid the buttons on my parka so I could reach inside and grab the pistols if I needed to.

I got lucky in the first room, finding what I needed. Smiling, I tucked them into my parka pocket and backed out, locking the door behind me and heading back to the stairwell.

"What do you need those for, Ant?" Westlin asked, frowning.

"You'll see, honey," I told her, pushing my way into the stairwell and looking up. Man, that was a long way to go. I shrugged, gathered my courage and will, and headed up the stairs, half dragging my left leg.

I paused at the fifth floor landing, digging in my parka with one hand and pulling down my cold weather mask and the goggles with the other. The snap of my Zippo was loud, but that first inhalation of nicotine laden smoke was pure heaven. I took a few slow drags, then struggled to my feet, using the banister as leverage.

"...the banister's lucky..." I misquoted, leaning heavily on it.

"Seriously, Ant, what's your plan?" She asked again. I just smiled at her and blew smoke out of my nose, lunging from the railing to the wall. I pulled the door open, groaning at the pain in my shoulder, and slipped into the hallway.

It was pitch black, but the glowstick was still providing me enough light to navigate. I'd kept my eyes closed when I'd lit my cigarette, so my night vision was still good. I made sure not to lean on the doors. I'd been in the barracks when it was dark and cold too often to fall for that gag.

"Come on, please tell me," She tried again. I just smiled.

The hallway seemed longer than I remembered. Each step my knee brace made that weird "pop-sproing-ging" sound. It was getting harder and harder to lift my arm.

The lizard's damage control boards were dark, except when Aine would pop up to stick her tongue out at him, but I could feel all the nagging injuries. Some I wasn't even sure how I'd gotten. My memories were weird, hazy, and I knew that I kept drifting.

I stopped in front of the double doors that led to the "near" side of the barracks, leaning at the small wall between the laundry room and the cleaning closet.

"You all right, Ant?" Westlin asked me.

I nodded, frowning. "I think so. Shoulder hurts bad, don't remember hurting it."

She nodded at that. "Yeah, figured you didn't."

WARNING! SYSTEM FAILURES! WARNING!

The lizard saw my plan and tried to abort it. He slapped several buttons that had been installed when I'd been at Blackbriar and at Citadel Ridge, but none of them worked. He hissed in frustration, stared at my plan, then curled up in a ball. I pushed off the wall, turning around and opening the door. There in front of me what was I needed, in gallon and half-gallon jugs. I grinned at the contents, grabbed a trash bag and flapped it open.

"Ant?" Westlin asked, drawing out my suspiciously.

"Yes?" I answered mildly, putting another trash bag into the first.

"Ant?" Her voice was a little more stern.

"Yes, Westlin?" I put a third inside the second then looked over the closet.

"What are you doing?" She asked me as I started grabbing bottles and putting them into the bag. Five bottles total.

"Carrying out Chief Henley's orders," I told her, turning around and limping to the stairs. The doorway was easy enough to open.

"Why do you need that?" She asked me as I limped down the stairs. On one of the monitors a lecture from Blackbriar was playing. I ignored it, just like I ignored the fact that Aine and Westlin and Cromwell were no longer mocking the lizard, but staring in horror at my plan.

"Orders," I told her, rounding the mid-way landing. My knee buckled but I didn't go down.

WARNING! SYSTEM FAILURE! WARNING!

That would have been bad.

"Ant," She said softly.

I ignored her, moving down the fourth floor.

"Quiet, I'm working," I told her.

I could feel her disapproval as I gathered the 1/2 gallon and gallon jugs I needed, put them into the bags, then dragged them down to the next level.

Once I was down to the second floor I took a break, the two mop buckets next to me. I'd cleaned out everything I needed from the closets, arranged the bottles next to me, and lit another cigarette. I'd heard a group go by downstairs, entering the stairwell at the first floor and moving down to the bottom floor. It was weird, the way we had to number it. The bottom floor, or Ground Floor, was below the level of the ground on the front of the building, but high enough above the ground that we had a loading dock on the back of the building. It had to do with how steep the hill was, but it still seemed like a weird way to do things.

But hey, I was just some low rent enlisted slob, nobody asked thugs like me about jack or shit.

I picked up one of the jugs, twisted the cap off, and started pouring it into the mop bucket.

"Ant, seriously, is this your plan?" She asked me. I glanced at her, and her eyes were wide with horror. "You're really going to do this?"

"Yup," I told her.

She hugged herself and shivered. "Jesus, Ant."

I just shrugged, ignoring the pain in my shoulder, and poured another bottle into the mop bucket. Once that one was half full, I poured half of a bottle I'd only grabbed one of, then switched to the other bucket. Westlin watched me the whole time, her eyes wide with horror.

Once I'd filled both of them half-way, I reached inside my parka and pulled out the one item I really needed for all of this. I set it on my lap and then lit another cigarette, staring at the buckets and thinking.

When I did this, there would be no turning back. One way or another, this would pretty much finish all of it. There would be some cleanup, sure, but that was no big deal. I mean, it wasn't like I hadn't done that kind of cleanup before.

The plan I had was brutal, and I knew that it would automatically trigger a psych-review on me. I'd blow it, but hell, I'd had a good run, you know?

"You sure about this?" Westlin asked me, squatting down next to me and rubbing my back. Her bare hand was warm on my skin, and I could feel knotting muscles relax.

"Yeah," I told her.

She shook her head, still rubbing my back.

I masked up quickly, then took out my knife and sawed through the tops of the containers I had left. Once that was done I started dumping the contents into the half full mop buckets. I could smell it through the filters, even though as cold as it was it wasn't exactly vaporizing easy.

When I looked up, Westlin was masked and had one finger stuck in the hole in her shirt.

"Jesus, Ant," She said again.

"Doesn't care about Special Weapons," I told her. I took out my blasting cap container and started running the wires, then wound the clock and set the alarm.

"Fifteen minutes, not bad," She told me, looking at my work.

The first clock had it's alarm striker attached to the pin on the thermite grenade. I'd flattened the end so it would slide out easy, but it was the best I could do. There was a chance it wouldn't work, but hell, I'd take that chance.

Each tub had two small nickle sized chunks of C-4 wrapped around blasting caps and taped up then taped on the side, the wires leading to a battery on one side, to a clothespin with a piece of cardboard clipped in it on the other. When the windup alarm clock went off, the striker would yank the cardboard free of the clothespin, completing the circuit. That would fire the blasting caps, which would blow the side out of the mop bucket as well as flip it on its side.

Well, in theory.

"Let's get going, we gotta do the other one," I told her. I struggled to my feet and into Hammerhead Hall. I couldn't seem to catch my breath, but that was normal wearing a mask in such thin air and I'd learned to deal with it. Once I had the double doors behind me I pulled off my mask and put it back into the case, neatly folded and wrapped.

The "Near Stairwell" didn't have cleaning closets, forcing me to go down the first floor and look into the CQ Area.

Empty.

I exhaled the breath I'd been holding and ghosted into the cleaning closet, grabbing what I had grabbed out of all the other closets.

After I masked I dumped them in the mop bucket then carried the mop bucket down the stairs.

The orderly room was empty, which surprised me. So was the Ready Room, which I thanked my good luck for.

Moving over to the middle of the room I set the mop-bucket down. I could smell the mixture on the floor, pulled out another thermite grenade, yanked the pin, and dropped it into the mop bucket. I could see it hissing under the fluid and moved away, over to the NBC Room.

The liquid behind me was bubbling as I unlocked the NBC Room door and walked inside, pulling it shut behind me.

It was time to clean up the survivors.

Clean up the vermin.

Magazines for the .45's in the desk drawer. Grab them, reload my depleted supply. Grenades in the cabinet. Rearm. Ignore the M-16's, they wouldn't do me any good. I couldn't hit shit with them, and what I had planned, they would be useless anyway.

The lizard saw what heavy case I was walking toward and began hammering on the abort button, to no result.

WARNING! SYSTEM FAILURE! WARNING!

"Ant, no," Westlin said softly as I knelt down and opened the case.

"Yes," I said gently, pulling the pieces out and starting to assemble them.

"Ant, you can't," She tried again.

"Yes, I can," I told her, threading the barrel in quickly and easily. I grabbed the wrench out of the case and locked it into position.

"Ant, please, no," She said softly.

"They're vermin," I told her. "Human vermin. You saw what they did to those females in the Dispensary. You saw the motor pool bay."

That shut her up.

I stripped off the parka, dropped my field jacket, and put back on the LBE before dressing in my work clothes. I shrugged back into the shoulder straps, and smiled.

They were trapped.

And I was coming.

I clomped out of the NBC Room, into the foggy Ready Room. I stopped in front of the Supply Room doors. According to Cromwell, they'd chopped through the doors between the War Stocks Room/Storage Room and the Supply Room.

They wouldn't live to regret that.

I hefted my weapon, putting pressure on the trigger and raising it up. The flame was blue, feeble but the injectors were working right.

The doors burst open when I kicked them, and the cloud of death around me rolled into the room.

The ammonia and bleach had combined, been vaporized by the thermite grenade, and filled the Ready Room, pouring in like an invisible wall of death around me.

The dozen or so people didn't know that though.

That wasn't what made them scream in terror.

I was.

Finish the Fight.