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

The Motor Pool

2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
29 October, 1987
1930 Hours

Blood sprayed from the man's throat, turning into frost in mid-air and whipping away in the wind. He stumbled as I pushed him forward into the snow, watching as he went face forward into the packed snow and shuddering.

Moving. Moving. Moving. I was running with snowshoes on, never easy, heading for the outcropping of rocks. It was too dark for good vision, too cold for NVG use, but between the needle-bright stars and the wedge of the moon vomited up by Fenrir reflected on the white snow, and high levels of visual purple in my eyes, I could see pretty well.

Behind me the flashlights were shining around, and bullets hammered off to my right. No idea what they were seeing, what they were shooting at, but as long as the bullets weren't hitting me or too close to me, I wasn't that worried.

The wind was picking up, which was a good thing, since it kept the banding from occurring, but also a bad thing, since it increased the wind chill to the point where I knew that exposed flesh would be frostbitten and necrotic within 60 seconds.

Those idiots had decided to chase me after I'd spotted a group of them and tossed a frag grenade into the middle of them. I hadn't spotted the others, and the chase was on.

Survivors from the massacre at the Chow Hall.

And they. were. pissed.

My knee brace was making noises again, that weird "pop sproing ging" every time I flexed my knee, and I knew if it wasn't for the heavy home-made brace my knee would have dumped me face first into the snow already. I was gambling on the wind muting the sound from the brace so they couldn't track me by the sound.

Maybe I was giving them too much credit. Lord knows that the Atlas Crew and more than a handful of guys in 2/19th could track someone by the noises they made, but that doesn't mean some Army Reserve unit who hadn't picked up a rifle in a decade could track me.

But there was the chance that some of these guys were hunters, woodsmen, or that Alfenwehr had changed them slightly, or even more like it had changed something in me.

That ice cold chunk in my shoulder throbbed as another burst of rifle fire sounded out. It wasn't panic fire, just they were seeing shadows.

So I needed to keep moving.

The air was goddamn thin, and I'd left the rubberized nozzle in my mouth, the valve open slightly, so that I was getting a constant trickle of O2 into my mouth so I could inhale it as I ran and panted. I had two more O2 bottles in my ruck, and holding out on myself now would mean I could pass out pretty easily. The mouth strap of my cold weather mask was closed, which made it harder to breathe, but kept the air from slicing my lungs to hamburger.

The outcropped of rock passed by on my right and I arced around it, coming to a stop and leaning against the ice and snow spattered rock. I kicked my snowshoes against the back of my ankle one at a time to knock the built up snow off of them. It wasn't much, but it would still make them heavier.

I pulled around the rifle, looking back over the snowy landscape in front of me.

That's when I saw it.

To the north the mirror smoothness of the clouds was erupting into upsweeping mushroom heads as something in the air changed.

A low pressure front was moving in from the north. When it slid over the top of the high pressure system that the clouds were forming the ceiling of, the cloud was suddenly erupting into the low pressure system like a goddamn atomic bomb.