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

Blackberries and Merry-Go-Rounds

2/19th SWG Barracks
2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
28 October, 1987
0620

It stared at me from the red ruined eye. Cold, merciless intellect handed down through millions of years. Curled up in the brainstem of a two hundred pound killing machine forged in hatred out of the wreckage of a human being. Six feet of Army built combatacon, designed to fight and win on the nuclear battlefield, no longer run by cognitive functions of a human brain but instead the killer instinct of a small reptile brain the size of a nickle. For a long moment we locked gazes, and I could swear I felt something twist and move at the base of my skull.

Sergeant Stillwater blinked. Just his right eye. The left eye, the sclera red with blood, even the iris full of blood, just stared at me. My brain said it was a blink. His right eye was empty, not soulless, but the brain, the intellect, that should have shown through that eye was gone.

During my career I had walked the streets of Pripyat, put tourniquet a compression severed leg, been shot through the stomach by a Russian doctor, and survived the man-made hell of Special Weapons Medical Training. I had seen and done terrible things, been through the horror of combat, which was fit for neither man nor beast.

Staring at my team leader, it took everything I had, standing in that cold and dark hallway, not to scream in terror.

Behind me I could hear the two men trying to get up and I silently willed them to lay down and play dead, to act as if I had already killed them before that tiny little chunk of gray matter in my Sergeant's brain identified them as targets and terminated them with extreme prejudice.

I was holding my breath. Stripped to the waist, my body nothing but burning agony, my sweat freezing to my skin, the knife in my hand slowly becoming frozen to my flesh as the blood that covered my fist from the man I had stabbed turned to frost and ice.

My life was poised on the single heartbeat that seemed to take forever.

It was impossible for a single heartbeat, in a body fueled by panic and terror, to take so long.

Stillwater turned around, a perfect about face, and stepped away.

The frozen moment broke.

I whirled around as the shadows wrapped around him, putting him out of my mind, my eyes catching the two men as they stood up. I blinked, and frozen tears on my eyelids broke away, taking my eyelashes with them.

One spit blood on the floor, but I didn't look, I kept my eyes locked with theirs.

"Gonna wish we killed you, bitch," The one on the right sneered.

"Gonna cornhole you good," The other threatened.

I clenched my jaw, watching their eyes, watching their balance. Stillwater had tasked Stokes, the massive Amazonian martial arts expert, to teach us all close quarters combat, following it up with his own lessons on knife fighting.

I was strong, freakishly strong for a woman, slightly above average for a man my height and weight, with fast reflexes honed and trained at Atlas, but if I let those two set the pace of the fight they'd finish me fast.

The one on the right started to blink, his eyes narrowing as his muscles came into play. The one of the left was reaching down with his left hand to grab his own crotch in an unspoken threat, his left hand slightly back to keep his balance on the frost-slicked floor.

...don't let your opponent set the pace, seize the initiative, act don't react...

Stokes' voice.