Gas & Blood (Damned of the 2/19th Novella) - Rough Draft Finished

Epilogue

We found out later that Staff Sergeant Bonnham had turned in the keycards, the new codes, and the keys, then had gone to talk to the CO about what had happened with the lightning protections out at Atlas.

They had argued.

Bonnham had shot him in the face with her M1911A1.

She was being sent back to the United States to undergo psychiatric examination.

We all knew that Blackbriar had reached out its claws and grabbed her up like some kind of monster that lives under every child's bed. She was gonna be sent to Blackbriar, put through Special Weapons training, then, if she survived, to some shithole of a posting to punish her for murdering the officer that was responsible for the majority of the Atlas crew getting killed.

Timmons debriefed us when we got back from Pripyat. He was pale and wan, bulky bandages under the tie-dyed T-Shirt he wore. He'd gone back to Atlas to take some photos for the Agency and he'd stood up right as the sniper had fired. The round had punched through his upper left chest, throwing him on his back and leaving him there gasping in the mud until his other two agents managed to get him up to the helipad and the Ranger's Blackhawk flew him out. He should have been in ICU, but had insisted on doing the debriefing.

Stillwater broke the arm of one of the agents accompanying Timmons when the guy grabbed Stillwater by the ear, broke the leg of the other one when he came to the first one's 'rescue', and walked out of the debriefing. Nobody gave a damn, by then everyone pretty much knew that Stillwater was a full blown psycho by that time.

Our new CO took us off the active list for running the sites and revoked our PRP status until we went through another SSBI round of background checks. We knew that nobody would believe that we were there or what we had been asked to do. We worked out at the cold sites, got our medical checkups until the Army quit caring whether or not we were going to have problems with radiation exposure and if we would pass our background checks, and drank a lot.

Nobody cared about what happened at Atlas, the news of Chernobyl covering up what had gone down at Atlas. Russia didn't care about the GRU agents we'd killed, but they sent us fucking coins via our friends across the 1K Zone for our participation in Pripyat. Our Spetz friend got promoted. 1/68th Armor went back to doing whatever tankers do when they aren't inside their tanks, probably laying on the floor gasping like fish while they tried to remember how to breathe. The German government didn't bother forcing us to clean the site, more worried about the fallout dropped across Germany and the public's response. Maximum background count was raised. We went back to Atlas before the ink was dry on our clearances. Stillwater passed his physical and psychiatric examinations but I had lingering doubts, after all, I'd watch my friend change a lot. We all got tattoos, in Russian, calling us the "liquidators", that the Spetz did for us like prison tattoos.

And tens of thousands of women across Western Europe got abortions.

A month after we got back Sergeant Reddings was killed when a stack of 8" FASCAM-AT rounds fell on him, reducing him a smear of jelly as literally tons of steel ammunition fell on him. It was his fault, he was ground guiding the forklift that slammed into the corner of the stack, so Atlas killed him for being sloppy and stupid.

And life at Atlas went on.

I wish I could say things had changed. I wish I could say we made a difference, but we all knew, even then, that nothing we did mattered to anyone beyond us.

Staff Sergeant Bonnham came back a year later, a Special Weapons tab on her left shoulder, like us. Cromwell and Farley, Groom and Sawmoth, all came when she did, with tabs of their own. They were different, somehow. Darker, harder, more full of black humor and nihilism.

More like us.

Seargeant Bonnham expected people to avoid her. She found out that everyone from the hot-sites trusted her more than almost any other Senior NCO. We closed ranks around her. Any insult to her was met with fists and raw hatred.

She was one of us.

She understood us, we understood her.

After all, blood for blood, right?

That's what Alfenwehr and Atlas taught.

Blood for blood.