Training Area, Indoor
Fifth Floor
2/19th SWG Barracks
2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
28 October, 1987
0130

Stillwater went perfectly still as I moved up on the guy he'd destroyed the arms of, drawing the bayonet out from my boot as I did so. Stillwater was immobile, breathing slow, burbling breaths like he was drowning, coughing every once in awhile. I knew he was clearing his lungs of the clotted blood that had filled them after he had been left to die.

I knelt down next to the injured man, smiling at him. "To quote Tiffany and the Beatles, 'I think we're alone now...', pumpkin," I told him, stealing Stillwater's favorite thing to call other people. He glared at me as I rolled him onto his back, giving a small outcry when his weight came off of his shoulder.

"I ain't telling you..." he started.

The bayonet made a crackling sound as I plunged it into his stomach. Field Surgery School at Blackbriar had taught me exactly where to stab him that would cause agony but not damage any vital organs or sever any arteries or pulmonary veins.

He screamed in agony the cold steel blade ripped through a major nerve plexus. See, bayonets aren't made like other knives. Something about the metal made it so that the blade burned like fire, something about the way they sharpened up made it so the wounds were torn slightly. Stillwater and Stokes had explained it to the entire Atlas crew during knife fighting training, but I had been paying more attention to the hot Ranger Major who was one of the instructors. Intriqued enough I let him pop my cherry on top of a MRLS 11" 6-pack of 350kt enhanced jacketed fusion warheads.

Crap, my concussion was making me drift.

I snapped my focus back on the read world just as Stillwater was bending down, reaching for the guy I was kneeling next to. His hand was dripping blood onto the guy's face, those huge strangler's hands wide enough that if he grabbed him, he'd cover the man's entire face.

"Stillwater, stand down," I snapped. He made a low growling noise, but straightened up.

"Now that you realize I'm not screwing around and your choices are stay silent and die painfully or talk and die quickly, you might want to talk," I told him.

"Fuck you, bitch, you don't have," he started again.

...why do they always say that?...

I stabbed him again. Twisting the knife to make him scream and leaving it inside his chest cavity. I hadn't hit anything important, but a bayonet was cold agony forged into a blade.

"How many personnel in your unit?" I asked him, putting my hand against his forehead and pushing the back of his head against the tile.

He choked and gagged, so I twisted the knife.

"How many?" I asked.

"More than a hundred, less than one-fifty, that's all I know," he shrieked out.

"How many still alive?" I asked him. He clenched his teeth in resistance so I slapped the pommel of the bayonet, jabbing it into him. When he finished screaming I bent down and stared into his eyes.

"How. Many?" I bit off each word.

"At least a hundred. I think only about a dozen have been killed," He gasped.

The retards hadn't actually searched me too well, just pulled the weapons from me and left the rest of the stuff. I pulled a plasticized canvas roll out of my right thigh pocket and unrolled it. I pulled out a morphine sticker, but looking at the clear plastic tube I could see that my body heat hadn't kept it liquid, it was more slush. I put it in between my fat tits and leaned down.

"Give me good answers, I'll pop you full of morphine and you can die in lala-land," I told him. "Lie to me, or refuse to answer..." I slapped the bayonet again. He screamed and I shrugged.

"Please, I have a family," He tried.

"You're the enemy, I don't care," I told him.

"I'm in the Army, just like you," he tried again.

"You took me prisoner, you tried to kill my squad leader," I leaned down real close to him, "And I seem to remember you being one of the ones who jammed a cock in my mouth before taking me to your little rat-shit hovel hide-out."

He went pale.

"So, answer, or suffer," I told him, and slapped the top of the bayonet again.

It took him a minute to get done screaming, so I looked up at Stillwater. He was still standing in one place, swaying slightly back and forth. He looked the right height, but I couldn't be sure all of that muscle mass was just him. He coughed, spat blood on the floor, then inhaled with a gurgling noise. His exhalations didn't get any condensation.

Good, he was starting to breathe. He wasn't producing enough body heat yet, probably slightly above ambient temperature, which was about ten below zero, which would explain the frozen blood and ice in his hair and on his uniform.

I wasn't gonna let the mountain take him. He was my friend, and damn it, I didn't have many friends ever, at all.

Dammit, girl, you're drifting again.

He'd finished screaming and was just sobbing. I put pressure on his forehead again and leaned down again to stare into his eyes.

"Why couldn't any of you use your own vehicles to go down the mountain?" I asked him.

"They dropped us off in a bus, we didn't bring any of our own vehicles," he sobbed.

He answered quickly after that, not wanting to risk the pain. His unit had been tapped in September to take over for 2/19th at the barracks. Other units had been tapped to handle the cold sites. They had been fine until they had lost power about two weeks ago. Apparently their CO hadn't wanted to leave, the generators automatically kicking on, but nobody could find the keys to the heavy rooms, and the generators had eventually cut out when nobody could switch the fuel tanks over.

I knew that the tank switching was supposed to take place automatically, but for the valves to fail in the freezing cold wouldn't be unheard of.

Then it had all come apart on them. The locks to the vehicles in the motorpool, as well as the other keys, had all come up missing and nobody could get the vehicles to start. They had no way off the mountain without the vehicles

That wasn't surprising. They hadn't been sending people up to start them, which meant that the engines had froze because nobody had started the generators at the motorpool, which meant the blocks cracked from cold and worse. It was so cold on Alfenwehr that even motor oil and anti-freeze froze.

Their CO had locked down all the food, stationing himself and his officers in the chow hall, along with a handful of people. Trusted NCOs at the motorpool, and left the enlisted and the Junior NCO's in the barracks, delivering food once per day to almost a hundred people.

Then the temp had dropped. Badly. People had died when the air pressure had dropped into the dangerous levels, when the air thinned out from the cold, and the air was so cold people started coughing up blood and getting pnuemonia.

They hadn't been able to figure out how to open the War Fighter Tunnels and didn't realize that the Medical Dispensary was a positive pressure system.

They had begun fighting between each other. They'd killed the handful of senior NCO's at the motorpool, but then fell to infighting.

That meant three groups. One in the barracks, all enlisted and junior NCO's, same with the motorpool, and one group at the chowhall, made up of officers, the remaining senior NCO's, the CO, and a couple handfuls of enlisted.

All three groups were willing to kill each other over the last of the resources. The food in the chowhall. The fuel at the motorpool to keep stoves in heat. And the protection of the barracks was all the group in the barracks had to offer, so they were getting cold and hungry.

They'd suffered casualties from a guy with an axe and "some grinning freak', and lost two groups that had been 'patrolling' the barracks.

Then we'd pulled up with a Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle fixed with a snowplow, a CUC-V, and a 5-ton cargo truck. That's why they had separated us, not knowing that Stillwater was a paranoid maniac. They'd tried to kill Stillwater, hell, had killed him, figuring incorrectly that one of us would have the keys.

And here we were.

I sighed, and leaned back, staring at the guy. I pulled the morphine injector out from between my breasts, looking at the morphine to make sure it was finally thawed, then jabbed it into his neck, pushing down the plunger.

He went out in less than a minute, his eyes fluttering closed.

When I turned around and stood up, Stillwater stood there staring at me. Instead of both of his eyes being blood red, just his destroyed eye had blood replacing the white. The blood he kept coughing up was red now, instead of blackish red, and he kept inhaling shakily.

And exhaling condensation.

Not much, just a faint suggestion of it, but that was a start.

I wiped the bayonet off on his leg and stood up, shivering slightly. My hands had gotten coated in blood and the cold had practically frozen them. It was easy to brush off the ice and dried blood as I thought for a moment.

"We need to check the rooms," I told him, then waited.

After a moment it wound through his gray matter and he nodded. I saw the difference engine in his brain kick on, run the probabilities, then slow down and come to a halt.

...dammit, your brain better start working soon. I need that tactical and strategic skill of yours if I'm going to get us out of this...

Well, the first thing would be to get power restored in the barracks. No power meant it was dark and cold, and Tandy and Alfenwehr loved the dark and cold.

...someone's let the winter in...

Those idiots. Those goddamn idiots.

If we went back inside the barracks, the would mean taking the Middle Stairwell, which, past QASI and the mailboxes was the double-doors that Stillwater had snatched me through, and I'd have to cut left immediately to go into the War Stocks room, cross over to the sub-basement access, go down a level, then access the generator rooms. I'd need to get the positive air system back on, the heaters, and the massive hot water tanks if we were going to survive. I had ten pregnant soldiers to think about. I needed to get those generators restarted.

That put me at risk of encountering more of the dead guy's crew. Stillwater was my edge, but my goal was to bring him back to the land of the living, not have him sustain more damage and stay in the realm of half-dead or undead.

Which meant I'd have to go around the building, outside in over forty feet of snow, in extreme temperatures normally only found at the poles. In the dark.

And figure out a way to get the doors open without a key.

I turned to Stillwater. "Easy, boy, I'm just going to pat you down. I need to access the generators, I need your keys."

His hand slapped over his pocket reflexively and he growled at me, his other hand clenching into a massive fist.

"I'm on the secure item access list, right?" I asked him. Almost three seconds later he nodded.
"Your keys are considered a secure item?" Again, slow response time, but he nodded again, giving a liquid, bubbly "yes" at the end of it. "Will you hand me your keys?" I asked him.

This time it took almost ten seconds for him to slowly nod. His hand went into his pocket and he pulled out a D-ring with at least five keyrings attached, all the keys marked with different colors of tape or marked with a black permanent marker.

He handed it to me and I took the hand off of the blood slicked keys.

"Do you know another way to the generator rooms?" I asked him. The outside access door would be buried under forty feet snow that would be sixty feet in some places due to drift.  I wasn't wearing good enough gear to survive much longer than a handful of minutes between the temperature, the wind chill, and the low pressure thin air.

He nodded.

"Do we have to go outside?" I asked him.

Again, he nodded.

...shit...

"I need to start the generators, Stillwater, can you get me there still alive?" I asked.

Again, he nodded, and this time smiled, showing blood slicked teeth.

I could see something old, inhuman, primal behind his eyes. Whatever it was, through the ruined eye, I could almost see it.

Stillwater was half back.

But what was the other half that stared at me from his ruined eye with cold calculating intellect?