Kilo-29 (Damned of the 2/19th, Book 15)

Part 39

Site Kilo-29
Winter-1993
Day Three-Night
Event Locker Medical

"How you feeling, Dee?" Kincaid asked.

"Chest hurts, but I can fucking breathe." Donaldson said, sitting up. He rubbed the little dot of blood from where I'd shoved the needle into his chest and withdrew the air and a little bit of bloody foam.

"Tell me if it starts to get worse, I'll use the valve on you." I told him. I slid my fingers over the top of my glasses and squeezed between my eyes.

"What valve?"

Using two fingers I tapped the right side of my chest. "Same one Nancy used on me during Desert Storm."

"She saved my life." Donaldson chuckled. "I can't even thank her."

Nancy looked up from where she was sitting on top of a gurney, filing her fingernails into points. "He can just be my cute little red bottomed slave for the weekend." She grinned. She fuzzed for a second, then snapped back into focus, going from being dressed in woodland BDU's to desert BDU's, the chocolate chips covered in blood from where she'd saved my life, saved Bomber, saved everyone who'd survived.

I laughed, but all either one of them did was glance over to where I was looking. Kincaid frowned and shook his head.

Nancy went back to filing her nails, and Bomber leaned next to her, dressed in chocolate chips and holding onto a beat up M-16A1, his desert boonie hat pulled low over his eyes. Taggart was sitting on the floor, eating an MRE with a half-finished cigarette in her hand.

"Shads and the others are still out there." Kincaid said, still dressed in only his towel. "We gotta keep them from getting killed."

"Can we take them?" Kincaid asked. I nodded.

"You heard them, they brought a twelve man team, we've already killed three." I'd wanted to leave them there, paralyzed, but Kincaid had stepped forward without saying anything or asking and burnt them down to greasy ashes. I wanted to use them to keep Tandy busy, but Kincaid's idea had merit too, since it kept Tandy from using their bodies.

My head throbbed, and I almost threw up when my stomach twisted. I had a cold shiver run down my back and my figertips went numb.

Both men nodded. Donaldson pulled on his T-shirt, putting the sliced side down his back, then gingerly began pulling on his BDU top.

"That leaves them with nine." I continued. "Shads is claiming to be you, so when the Major's crew challenges him, they'll know that something is going on, since you two don't sound alike."

"Plus he's a Mexican." Kincaid tossed in.

"Yeah, he doesn't look nothing like corn-fed over here." Bomber laughed. I nodded and lit a cigarette, taking a drag before Donaldson reached out and took it from me, sloppily inhaling. When he went to hand it back the butt was wet and I waved it away.

"Keep it." I lit another, Kincaid took that one, so I lit a third and continued. "That's if Shads leads them straight back. He's probably leading them around in circles, moving up floor by floor, and if he goes off of where we've been, they'll get lost pretty fucking quick."

"So how are we going to find them?" Donaldson and Bomber asked at the same time. Donaldson went double on me, but Bomber stayed in focus. I squeezed my eyes shut, then looked at him again. Both of them were in focus. "I mean, we gotta find 'em before you stab the shit out of them."

I grinned at that, holding up my notebook. "That part's easy." All five of them looked at me like I'd suddenly gone stupid. "We go up to military control, and I check the door entry logs."

"Yeah, but the doors don't need keycodes right now." Donaldson said, clicking together his belt and taking another sloppy drag off the cigarette. "Oh, man, never thought feeling lightheaded would be so nice."

"I should leave you two here." I told them.

"I'll bust your fucking knee." Kincaid growled. I chuckled.

"Not leaving me behind." Donaldson said, pulling at the bottom of his Kevlar vest to seat everything right. "I'm still up."

"You guys are injured." At that, all five of them laughed. Bomber had the upper right of his uniform cut away, his chest bandaged from where two bullets had gone through his chest and shattering his shoulderblade. Nancy's arm was bandaged from where shrapnel had mangled her forearm and broken her bideps. Taggart had a bandage on her left leg, another over her lower left abdomen, and a third on the side of her face. They were all dressed in first run chocolate chips, everyone but Taggart with a battered M-16, Taggart holding tight to the M-60 she'd ran until it had fallen apart.

They were all flickering, going from black and white to color and back, with streaks of static shooting across them.

"Sergeant, with all due respect, you've taken a crossbow bolt in the arm, you've dislocated your shoulder at least twice, and that mined your ass out." Donaldson said, picking up his rifle, wincing slightly. "We're just as good as you are."

For a moment I wanted to argue, tell them that they hadn't been part of 2/19th, hadn't been with me all the times the metal met the meat and it was down to sweat, blood, and bad breath.

"We all started unblooded, Fifty, even you." Heather's voice whispered in my ear. "We're not with you this time, they are, and they haven't let you down."

"You have a point about the doors." I told them, "Except Shads was quick on his feet. He told them they'll need the codes to get through the doors, which means he isn't about to tell them that they can just throw the locking bars to open the doors. He's making them punch in codes, slowing them down, probably taking them on a roundabout route. They'll make him punch in Donaldson's codes, so we've only gotta track one code."

A small rabbit ran across the room, skittering across the tile and vanishing into the vent, moving through the vent cover like it wasn't there.

I ignored it.

Kincaid stood there for a moment, taking a long drag off his cigarette. "Shit, I quit smoking in Basic." He caught my eye. "What's the story between you and Shads?"

"Someone ran his mouth when they should have shut the fuck up." I told him. "It's the past, and it's going to stay in the past."

"Clear, Sergeant." Kincaid said, taking a drag and closing his eyes. "Goddamn, this is good."

"So we head up to military control, track where they're going by what doors have been accessed, get ahead of them, and then what? Theirs nine of them."

"We fucking kill them, that's what." Kincaid put in. "They're goddamn scumbags. I don't give a shit who they work for, they came here to kill us, laughed about shooting you, and we all know what kind of skeezy bitch Agent Killain was." He looked at me, suddenly grinning, "I so hope you at least blew a load on her face once or twice."

Nancy looked up, her face interested. She liked to hear what I'd done with other women, and more than once had watched me, barely waiting till I was done to throw the other woman out and leap on me like a starving animal.

She kept flickering from dressed to naked, injured to uninjured, and twice flickered to the way she'd looked when Bomber and I had worked on her furiously while she'd mumbled instructions in between bouts of screaming the winter when...

when...

...nothing happened.

I locked my eyes on Kincaid. "Shoving it up her ass count?" I grinned back. The other two men laughed and I laughed with them.

"What's your old squad like?" Donaldson asked me, standing up. Kincaid went over and put his feet in the J-Suit, still smoking his cigarette. For a second the Africa crew stood there, armored J-Suits, flamethrowers, with Kincaid grinning at me, then it all flickered and went away.

"I ran a big crew, between eight and fifteen at any given time." I told them, giving Kincaid time to finish his cigarette. "Pulling eight, twelve, twenty hour days. During the Storm we got assigned to run ammo to units, resupply ones that didn't merit a full tractor trailer, ones that needed combat reloads."

"I wanna hear about Nancy, she's the one who saved us." Kincaid said, grinning. "She got nice tits?" behind him, Nancy bounced her tits, covered with blood from where blood had run off her gashed open face, her nipples peeling from too close of an encounter with frostbite. One breast had a deep puncture wound that oozed blood.

"Big ol' titties." I answered, watching her lick the blood off of her own nipples. "She's mean as a rattler with a sore tooth though. She doesn't believe in monogamy, she likes women too, and will get you to do the most outrageous shit."

"Like what?" Donaldson asked.

"She dared me to jump off a tenth story balcony and into a swimming pool." I grinned.

"Didja do it?" Kincaid took another long drag.

"Fuck yeah I did." I said, both of the other men laughed. Kincaid leaned down and put his cigarette out before straightening up and starting to pull on the suit. "Let's head out."

"Want your 16 back?" Kincaid asked.

"No, I suck with it. I got my metal." I told him, walking over and throwing the bar to let us deeper into the medical section.

"So you had Nancy, who else?" Donaldson asked as we walked down the hallway.

"Sergeant Bomber, my room-mate, Corporal Jackson, Corporal Lewis, Specialist Taggart, a bunch of people who came and went, but those five were with me the longest." I told them. "Sometimes I got people on loan from other crews, usually my older brother's crew."

"Wait, you and your brother were in the same unit?" Donaldson asked.

"Yeah, we got there a day apart. He was held over after AIT for a day because they only sent orders for me, he's in the Cav now, over at Fort Hood." I told them. "I'm just in whatever unit I'm attached to in between shit jobs."

We went passed the nuclear medicine section, walking slow.

"We haven't seen each other in awhile, though. My wife introduced him to his wife, we got in an argument a few months back and haven't talked." I told him.

...you gotta stop doing this, Ant, what the fuck are you trying to prove?...

...nothing, man, but someone gotta do this shit...

...you've got a wife and kid now, Fifty, you gotta think about them...

...so did those people in fucking Africa, who else is gonna do it? You? You fucking quit, remember...

...this is about her, isn't it? You've never forgiven yourself for...

...you finish that sentence, I'll break your fucking jaw...

Blood spattered across the walls suddenly, screaming echoed down the hallway, along with shouting and laughter. My vision doubled, and my stomach suddenly hurt badly. The doorway at the end of the hallway shattered, the shockwave heading toward me, and I brought my right arm up, turning my face away as the blast reached me.

"Sergeant!" Bomber was shaking me, and I looked at him, his face smeared with blood and bruised from where I'd slammed into him, knocking him down when the doors to Titty Territory had slammed into me, the blast wave picking me up and slamming me into him before skidding down the hallway, rag-doll, my vision going as I slid and the edge of the door hit me in the face, bouncing away, feeling something pop in face and the back of my head, feeling my body go numb...

no

wait

Donaldson's face snapped into focus. He was crouched down, next to me, shaking my bad shoulder. The pain rocketed out of my shoulder and into my head for a second. Donaldson vanished, replaced by Jackson, who was wearing his woodland BDU's and shaking his head.

"He's burning up, Nagle. He's really fucked up." Jackson said, looking over his shoulder.

"I'm OK." I told him, but he vanished to be replaced by Donaldson.

"No, you aren't, Sergeant." Donaldson told me, still crouched down. He lifted up my eyepatch and shined his flashlight in my eyes. "Your bad eye, the pupil isn't even moving, and you've got blood under it. It looks like you're tearing up, but it's blood. Sergeant, something's serious wrong."

"It'll pass." I told him, starting to push myself up. Donaldson put his hand on my shoulder and held me down. "That happens all the time to that eye, that's why I wear the patch, Jackson, so it doesn't run down my face."

"Sergeant?" He asked me. There were all kinds of questions in that one word.

"I think you're hurt bad, Sergeant." Donaldson said. He tilted my head and looked at my ears. "The side of your head is all bruised up, and you've got blood inside your ear, I think, or maybe just snowmelt through the blood, it's pink."

Nancy's head lifted up from where she was working on John, trying to patch him up well enough to survive the battle. She opened her mouth, frowning, but then went back to John when he screamed, a bubbling sound as his punctured lung bled into his mouth.

...pink...

why was that important?

"I'll be fine." I told him, pushing his hand away and standing up. "Been hurt worse and survived to carry out the mission."

I saw Kincaid shoot me a strange look but he held his tongue. The room tilted, and I swayed for a second. The blood vanished from the hallway when I blinked a few times. I started walking forward, shaking my head.

We walked quietly to the elevator, Kincaid thumping along behind me. I stood there, watching the gap in the wall for a long time. It kept doubling and tripling in my vision, and the two times I saw Nancy standing in front of me she was blurred, hazy, indistinct.

"We're going to have to go up fast and hard, blow through the creatures up there. Kincaid, you're in the lead." I said, leaning out and putting my hand on the wall to steady me. "Don't fire that thing off if you can help it, you'll fucking cook us in there, and we'll be below you, you'll fucking roast us."

"You take the lead, Sergeant." Kincaid said. He sounded out of breath. "Do I have to wear the suit?"

"You might get chemical exposure, and it'll protect you." I told him.

"I'm fucking exhausted, Sergeant." Kincaid said, sagging. "I'm sorry, Sergeant, but I'm fucking done."

"The boy's almost done, Ant. He's not trained for this, and that fucking fuel pack has got to be killing him." Bomber told me. He was leaning against the wall, holding his side, and threw up steaming bile into the snow on the ground.

"He's not ChemCorps, Ant. I told you that you'd have to do this, for him at least." Nancy said, looking up with red eyes from weeping.

Another rabbit scooted down the hallway, shooting by us and vanishing in the darkness.

Kincaid stared at the darkened doorway for a long moment, then sighed and rolled his shoulders to shift the suit to a more comfortable position. "I can do the stairs again, but I don't know if I'll be worth a shit afterwards."

"You know what you've got to do, Ant." Bomber said, coming up next to me. "Just like the ground war, baby."

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose again. I reached into my pocket, where I'd shoved a bunch of pill bottles and a few pre-loaded stickers into it. It took four tries to get the right bottle, little white pills inside.

"Look, this isn't something I want to do, it really isn't." I said. I rattled the pill bottle. "Help Kincaid get the hood off." I turned to Bomber. "Bomber, come here, help me for a second."

Bomber laughed at me, and shook his head. "Ant..."

"Sergeant, he's not here." Kincaid said. "It's just me and Dee."

"Sorry, sorry." I said, and rattled three of the pills into my hand. I carefully put the bottle back together and shoved the bottle into my pocket, pulling out another bottle. I rattled two big white pills, carefully capped it, shoved it back in, then pulled out a bottle and rattled three green gel-capsules into my hand before putting the bottle back.

"Got it, Sergeant." Donaldson said. I looked over, to see that Kincaid's hood was thrown back, revealing his sweat covered face. I looked at the pills in my hand, knowing what I was about to do was dangerous as shit.

"Take one of each, the big one's a pain killer." I told them. When they stepped forward, Kincaid's hood whispering, I shook my head. "I hope you don't have any heart problems."

"Not me, Sergeant, my fucking heart's made of iron." Kincaid said, picking one of each pill out of my hand.

"I'm fine." Donaldson said. "Cross country runner in High School, lettered varsity."

"So no heart murmurs?" I asked, looking at the left over pills in my hand. Both men told me no, and I threw the pills into my mouth, swallowing them dry, then started pulling out my meds and taking them one at a time while the other two watched.

"Uhh, Sergeant, isn't that going to put you to sleep?" Donaldson asked.

I snickered, swallowing the last one. "Not after the other pills."

"What were they?" Kincaid asked, handing Donaldson back his canteen.

"The big white one is morphine." I told them. They both stared at me. "Yeah, well, we don't have a choice. You guys need painkillers. The green one is an antibiotic, experimental back in the early 80's, but it stays stable at room temperature for years, so you don't have to worry about it going bad." I grimaced. "It's a shotgun, it's going to kill the bacteria in our guts too, so we're going to end up with the shits in about twelve hours."

"Fuck it, we'll probably have bigger problems." Donaldson said, swallowing his down.

"What happens if I shit in the suit?" Kincaid asked me.

"You're boots will be full of sweat and shit, that's it." I told him, starting to light cigarettes and pass them out.

"You ever shit in your suit?" He asked me, taking one and taking a deep drag off of it.

"I wore it for nine days once, what do you think?" I told him.

"Man, that must have smelled foul." Donaldson shook his head, taking the cigarette I offered. He coughed then groaned, putting his hand up to where I'd punctured his chest with the needle.

"Tight?" I asked. He shook his head and I looked at Kincaid. "I didn't even notice after awhile. But when we all took them off, it smelled like a fucking cesspool."

They all laughed, and I watched them. "We'll smoke these, then head up the stairwell, you oughta be feeling the meds by then."

"What about the little white one?" Kincaid asked.

"Amphetamine." I told them. Donaldson jerked. "It's all right if they're used in an emergency or when the mission dictates it."

"Have you ever taken them?" Donaldson asked, almost accusingly. "You fucked jacked us up on speed?"

"A few times. The ground war I stayed up over 100 hours, we all did." I told them, being honest. "Normally their handed out to the pilots and shit, some operator teams pack them just in case, and I've been handed them a couple of times. The Storm was the worst, they jacked us up bad, but there wasn't any choice, and we'd been up almost all day when the ground war kicked off. The war lasted like 90 hours, we were heading back after the war when..." I trailed off when Nancy shook her head and put her finger to her lips.

"A hundred hours, seriously?" Donaldson asked. Kincaid had let out a low whistle at the time.

"Yeah. Taking the speed and fear does a lot to keep a man awake." I told them. My stomach cramped briefly, but I inhaled deeply to keep from throwing up.

"Scary?" Kincaid asked.

"Yeah." I told them, taking a deep drag off my cigarette.

"Bad, Sergeant?" Donaldson asked. He put his hand against his stomach. "Fuck, stomach cramps normal?"

"Yeah, they happen." I told him. "Me and what was left of my crew were in the hospital for a long time afterwards." I pinched between my eyes again, and Bomber rezzed out for a second before snapping back into focus. "Bomber, Nagle, Taggart, Jackson and I were in ICU for awhile in Saudi Arabia before they shipped us back to the States."

"Ever go anywhere people didn't try to kill you?" Kincaid asked, but he smiled, which made it all right.

I laughed, feeling the fatigue start to wash away. My heartbeat started going up, making sharp pains shoot through my shoulder, into my chest, and down my right arm. "Not since after Basic Training."

"Who tried to kill you in AIT?" Donaldson asked. He rubbed his chest, over where I'd pulled the air out of his chest to reinflate his lung. "Fucking heart is hammering."

"Yeah, it'll pass." I told him. "Training tries to kill you, man. You end up working in a live chemical environment, you have to decon a vehicle, and then there's one of the final exercises where you work in a simulated mass-cal with live VX." I shook my head at the memory. "It felt like they were actually trying to fucking kill us."

"What kind of AIT is that? Christ." Kincaid said. He stood up and rolled his head, cracking his neck. "Starting to feel better now." I just shrugged, field stripping my cigarette by pinching the cherry off, rolling the excess tobacco out, and tucking it in my pocket.

"What's with that?" Donaldson asked me.

"Tobacco will vanish in a little bit, but cigarette butts stay there for months. Leave no trail if you don't have to."

"Christ, this is going to be a paranoid life, isn't it?" Kincaid asked, suddenly shuddering. "Wow."

"You gonna stick?" I asked him, waiting for Donaldson to finish his.

"I'm not going through all this shit just to go back to being a fucking mechanic." He told me. "Fuck that, Sergeant. I used to like working on cars and shit, now I fucking hate even seeing a goddamn socket-wrench, and I hate the way motorpools smell."

"How about you?" I asked Donaldson, trying to ignore the thumping pain in the back of my head. "You gonna go back to your old unit and keep being a combat engineer?"

He thought for a long moment, closing his eyes and shuddering. "No. You can't just walk away and go back to your old job after something like this. I can just see trying to explain to my CO why I'm all twitchy now."

Donaldson emulated what I'd done, while Kincaid took the last drag off of his and followed our example.

"Let's do this shit, help me button up, Dee." Kincaid said. Donaldson nodded and helped him put the hood back on and it took only a few seconds for the forced air to push the suit back taut.

"Lead the way, K-Bar." I grinned, waving at the dark hole in the wall.

"Fuck yeah." He replied, popping the igniter.

He sounded a lot better.

We headed into the stairwell, the smell of it hitting us immediately. One of the things that I'd fought up higher was laying on the heavy I-beam, its body broken and its eyes glittering in the light of the flashlights that Donaldson and I had turned on. Both of us had the flashlights hanging off our LBE's, the little loop that we hung shit off of that was on both shoulder straps. Donaldson had a field dressing on his, mine had both a field dressing and a compass on the the left side.

Our bootsteps thudded as we climbed the stairs, heading up. Kincaid kept popping the igniter, the pale blue of the flame reflecting off the strings of something shiny in the solid rock the shaft was bored through. The dim red pinlights were spaced every ten feet, there was a faint breeze coming from above that washed over my skin, a knife was on the second landing, a meat cleaver with a cord hanging from the end decorated with beads coiled on the metal diamond plate of the fourth landing, and a ton of other details I absorbed as we climbed up to where I'd cleared off the landing.

The landing where I'd fought with the creatures was completely barricades over. It felt like my nerves were singing, and I was very aware of my hearbeat on all my injuries. The nerve damage in my left arm was like wet slick fire around my elbow.

I kept seeing things in the darkness, things that didn't make sense. Faces pushing out of the rock, people who were dead, people who I'd left behind or had left me behind, glitter covering everyone, small fairies dancing on the railings. Snatches of old conversations were coming back to me, all disconnected, none of them with anything in common but the past.

At one point I drew my knife and stepped forward, the blade whispering as it cleared the sheathe, narrowing my eyes and bringing it up to bring it down between the third and fourth ribs, angled down.

The cop had my sister against the wall, her shirt pulled up, one hand wrapped around her neck and squeezing, the other up under her skirt. Her breasts were in the open, bite marks around the nipples, her upper thighs exposed, her panties down around his wrist. My sister's eyes were wide, terrified, and her face was purple. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back, her lipstick smeared, and she already had a black eye forming.

My brother was stepping forward, reaching out toward the cop to tear him away as he ducked down to clamp his mouth on my sister's nipple. He was going to pull him back, pull the cop back, who'd go for his gun, but we'd pound him down to the ground until his partner came running down the alley and put his pistol against the back of my head.

Not this time.

I raised the knife up, and stumbled over the step.

The memory vanished, and I was leaning against the railing, my hands empty, my knife still at my waist. Donaldson stopped on the stairs, almost a half dozen above me.

"Sergeant?" He asked.

I shook my head, ignoring the heave in my stomach. I waved him forward, pushing myself off the railing, the pounding in the back of my head making me sick, and started climbing behind him.

At the level where the panel had been popped and the opening barricaded I stumbled to the railing and retched, dry heaving a few times before a thin stream of bile spattered into the darkness. Donaldson had stopped and came back to rub my back while I kept dry heaving.

"The drugs?" Donaldson asked when I straightened up. I nodded, wiping my mouth, my hand coming away with blood across the back. "Your nose is bleeding." Donaldson added.

"Yeah, the drugs." I told him. "I'm OK."

Donaldson looked doubtful, but we hustled up to catch Kincaid.

The dark hallway we finally reached seemed like it took forever to materialize out of the darkness. We were still feeling good, Kincaid chuckling at something now and then.

"What is so fucking funny?" I asked him after we'd stepped into the hallway.

"Heh, Sergeant Fifty Foot Ant." He chuckled. "I figured it'd be like 'Stabby' or something. You never did tell us how you got that nickname."

"I told someone I'd stomp their ass like a fifty foot ant, and it stuck for some reason. It beats my old nickname." I told him, leaning against the wall and closing my eyes, letting my head drop down. Before they could even ask I kept talking. "I was staggering down the hallway one morning, still drunk from the night before, after like a five day bender, and one of the girls in Titty Territory started laughing. She said I looked like Gobo off of Fraggle Rock, and the nickname Fraggle stuck for almost six months."

Kincaid laughed, sharp and brittle, the laugh telling me that he was flying high on the amphetamines.

The temperature dropped significantly, our breath suddenly steaming in the cold. From the darkness came a sibilant hiss, no words to it, but the sound of it raised the hair on the back of my neck.

"We need to move." I said, shoving myself off the wall and almost falling. My vision dimmed, or the flashlights did, but the sparkles across my vision told me that it was probably my vision. "Now."

"Let's go." Donaldson said, pushing himself forward off the wall.

"Moving." Kincaid snapped, clumping forward and popping the igniter rapidly.

"Jesus, it's cold." Donaldson said, coughing and rubbing his chest. He glanced at me. "Just aching."