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

Power and Darkness

War Stocks Room
First Floor/Basement
2/19th SWG Barracks
2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
28 October, 1987
0245

Science says that the dark is merely an absence of light. The Christian religion says that God can light the darkness. The older religion of my grand-mother and grand-father said that terrible things lurked in the dark and only prayer to Gods and placating otherwordly forces means you will survive next to your feeble little fire as Sidhe pressed close.

I could feel Sidhe, could feel the darkness of the Underworld pressing on me with a vast weight as we tromped through the lightless expanse of the War Stock Room. A full city block, a quarter that wide, underneath the ground on the west side, at ground level on the east side. Offices separated the massive room from the eastern side of the barracks.

No sun ever touched the walls of the War Stocks Room. No sun had since it had been built. The wan light of the glowstick stuck between my fat tits only showed me Stillwater's vague shadow and the greenish hued pale flesh of those bags of frozen meat attached to my chest.

It smelled of cold, of rotting meat, of rotted blood, and of rust and hatred.

Something moved beyond the wan light. Slow, unhurried, purposeful. Something that malevolence rolled off of in cold waves.

I shivered, my stomach twisting as it looked for something, anything, to convert to fuel to keep my core temperature up.

The human body can survive for hours, days, with a core temperature as low as 96, but it wasn't good for you, and you'd start to drop into hypothermia when your core temperature hit 95.2, and you'd die not much further.

John Bomber had survived, somehow,  with his core temperature dropped to 85 degrees, but he'd spent three weeks in the hospital and was considered a goddamn medical miracle.

I knew it was just because he was too goddamn Texas stubborn to die that easy.

I was drifting again, the head wound from getting knocked out with an axe-handle combining with the sub-zero temperatures to make me woozy.

At least we were out of the wind.

There was the faint clickering of nails on cement off to my right, repeated to my left, and moving behind me. Claws on bare, grooved cement. Things moving, things able to survive the cold, the dark. Things that were undoubtably hungry.

Stillwater stopped, made a right face, and started moving again.

His left eye glowed red softly. in the darkness when the light from my chemlight washed over his face. I told myself it was reflection of the blood filled sclera and pupil.

The lie didn't make me feel better, I'd seen that inhuman calculating intelligence behind that eye, peering at me from somewhere in that complex and strange gray matter than Stillwater called a brain.

I suddenly remembered I'd heard him mention "the lizard" before, referring to it as if it was an actually living lizard curled around his brainstem, r-complex, and hindbrain.

My skin prickled up in goosebumps as I realized it was real.

And it was looking at me through Stillwater's ruined eye.

Stillwater started moving again after a few heartbeats, heading for the east wall. I could only hope that he knew where he was, I was lost in the darkness. I had no idea how far we had moved or where the door was located in relation to us.

When the door loomed out of the darkness, canvas covered pallets on either side of it, I almost sobbed in relief.

Instead of going through the door Stillwater stopped at one of the pallets, bending down and checking the tag attached to the pallet. He stood back up and started walking down the row of stacked pallets.