Time/Date Error (Damned of the 2/19th-Book Six) - Done

It's a Girl

2/19th SWG War Fighter Tunnels
Alfenwehr
West Germany
28 October, 1987
0800

The booming noise of the door shutting and the thunder of the bolts slamming home punctuated what I had just done. The air vibrated with the force of the chain driven door slamming into the frame.

Lights were coming on with clacking noises that I could barely hear.

"Is Sergeant Stillwater..." Neelson started.

"He'll be fine. He excels at the kind of fight he was in," Groom snapped, her voice pulling me out of dark thoughts about how I'd locked one of my only friends outside with a bunch of murdering cannibals. "They're not going to take Ant."

"He's the Atlas Ant, worry about ourselves," I growled, turning around. Everyone was staring at me, their eyes wide over their oxygen masks. "We need to fire the tunnels up and Harris needs medical treatment right now."

I pushed my way through them, careful not to elbow anyone in the stomach or knock anyone down, ignoring my instincts to do just that. I paused to look at Harris. He was unconscious, blood frozen on the right side of his chest.

"How do we do that?" Groom asked, pulling the sling of the shotgun over her head and bending down to pick up Harris with a grunt.

"I have no idea, but Stillwater wrote directions down," I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the pieces of paper Stillwater had ripped free of his little green notebook. I opened them up and the first words written made me grin.

Do not panic!

"If you hadn't have locked him outside," Gordons started to say.

I read the next line.

If an eighteen year old fuckup like me can fire them up, you can too. You have your Citadel Ridge training to fall back on, and my confidence.

"Shut the fuck up," Wright snarled. "You didn't see it."

I read the next line before folding it up.

You have your training. You have experience. Keep the preggos alive. Keep the wounded alive.

I elbowed Gordons in the stomach. "What she said."

My boots thudded on the metal grill that made up the floor as I started moving down the tunnel. I was looking over the instructions for how get everything running. Fire up the power first, turn on the lights, turn on the heat, turn on the blowers. Go to the computers, seal the doors at the ends of the tunnels. Seal the inner doors. Stay in the main complex. How to turn on communication. A map of the "egg" where everything I'd need was at.

Harris moaned, a pain filled agonized sound.

I picked up my steps and looked back and had to slow down. Two of the preggos were holding their stomachs and waddling, one of them, Beach I think her name was, huffing under her face mask.

Her crotch and the tops of the inside of her thighs was soaked.

...crap...

She gave me a wan smile and kept waddling forward.

Harris needed surgery, and I had a preggo in labor.

Neither would survive if I didn't fire up the tunnels. But if I took the time to do that, then they both could end up dead from complications. Every second Harris's heart was pumping blood into his chest cavity, crushing his lungs. Every second Beach (or whatever her name was) would get weaker and weaker and the baby would be at...

Wait.

Training.

She would be fine even if it took me several hours to treat Harris. Her body was designed to give birth, she was Grade-A Army Machine, she could handle labor. Harris's body wasn't designed to take a bullet to the chest. Without medical attention he would die.