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

Part 30

Site Kilo-29
Event Locker Area - Military Area
Winter, 1993
Day Three-Morning
Status: Full Offensive Measures Engaged

Picture a snowman clad in rags, ice and snow packed into a solid form. Now picture that same snowman being hit by a hose running warm water, the way it corrodes, the way the water just eats away the snow.

That's what happened when the flamethrower hit bodies. The core was around 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, flesh was converted to steam as soon as it brushed the bodies of the things that rushed Kincaid.

When I'd been in training they'd used a flamethrower like Kincaid was using to melt a car down to nothing more than a lump of slag in order to demonstrate to all of us idiotic hammer heads just how dangerous the weapon was. It had taken around ten minutes before the vehicle was reduced to a glowing mass with rivulets of running metal flowing off of it.

The area we were moving through was the Event Locker Administration section, rooms of desks, classrooms, meeting rooms, and file cabinets. We moved into the darkness, only our flashlights and the NVG's giving us any edge in the hallways and rooms as we swept through the facility and cleared the creatures out of it.

Kincaid wielded it like an expert. He kept it to short bursts, aiming center mass and hitting the trigger with light touches. The flame would gout out, striking the creature in the chest, and if Kincaid held it for longer than a few heartbeats the flame would burst out the back of the creature.

When the creatures tried to take cover Kincaid just splashed it onto their cover, and more than once they lunged up from behind the cover, already on fire, screaming in agony, and Kincaid would wash it over them again. He ignored the way they sometimes danced around, screeching in agony before the fire seared their lungs and they fell to curl into a fetal position as the flame tightened the ligaments and then slowly charred them to stick figures. He'd often wait for Donaldson to open the door to a room, then step into the doorway and slowly sweep the bar of flame across the room, incinerating anything inside, from files and furniture, to creatures that screamed in agony for a few short heartbeats or just dissolved.

By the third room the sprinkler system kicked on, but the water did nothing to put out the merciless rod of fire Kincaid played over the creatures while they screamed and Kincaid laughed. Steel sagged, concrete glowed sullenly, and Kincaid burnt the bodies to ash and steam without hesitation, without mercy.

The steam clogged our filters, making it hard to breathe, but we followed Kincaid as he moved down the hallway, Donaldson throwing the lever, Kincaid just sweeping it into the room and burning down anything that showed itself or sometimes just to burn the room to cinders.

One of the rooms he stopped, stepping back.

"Sergeant." His voice was muffled, but he'd stopped laughing.

I looked inside, and there were several of the females, the first ones we'd seen, crouched down like beasts in front of smaller version of themselves. The little ones had eyes that didn't look right, most of them had hairlips that expanded into snot encrusted holes, only two had ears and those were lopsided and deformed. There were misshapen heads, waterheads, paddle-like arms, and eyeless sockets in unfinished faces.

There was nothing human in that room.

I pulled a grenade off of Donaldson's LBE and pulled the pin.

"Fire in the hole!" I called out, then threw the grenade into the room, stepping back by the side of the door and pressing my back against the thick concrete wall.

The blast seemed weirdly muffled.

Kincaid stepped back into the doorway and went back to work with the flamethrower.

With that exception, Kincaid kept up a running commentary the entire time, mostly lines from Aliens, taking to the work like he'd been born to it. Maybe he had, maybe he'd just been born too late and had belonged with Special Weapons from the day his father had knocked up his mother, same as me, same as Bomber, same as Nancy, and the same as we found out Taggart had been.

At one point the ceiling plates collapsed, giving us a second warning that they were trying to drop on Kincaid, to get behind him, but by the time they dropped to the ground I had the machete clear of the sheathe. My first swing sheared into it with a crunch that spilled all kinds of important things out as my swing pulled the blade free of the body, the body flying against the wall as I kicked the second one away with one boot and took on the other two. Donaldson shot the one I'd kicked, a slash opened up one, spilling its intestines on the ground, and my back slash slammed into the last one's head. I had to step on it to pull the machete free while Donaldson shot the one screaming and trying to push its insides back in.

It was sheer butchery, both with the flamethrower and with the machete, but sometimes butchery is all that's left.

They tried twice more, but I was ready. One got inside Kincaid's safety radius, jumping over one desk and ducking under another, but two shots from Donaldson and it went down. Kincaid burned it as he backed out of the room. Once those things came at us from behind, but Shads and Natchez opened fire with their weapons and chopped them into mincemeat.

Kincaid turned around and roasted the bodies.

It became obvious after awhile that we were herding them ahead of us, that they'd finally learned to fear us. Once we caught them in a hallway and Kincaid arced up the stream and obliterated the creatures almost the entire length of the hallway, laughing as he did so.

"Burn, bitches, burn!" he howled, loud over the sprinklers, the muffling of his suit, and the roar of the flamethrower. The bulky suit made him look nearly twice his size, and for an odd reason I struck by the legend of Prometheus, bringing fire to humans.

Only I doubt he howled with laughter and used that fire to incinerate them.

The last group was in front of a heavy blast door, most of them clawing at it, some of them breaking and charging us, others rolling on their back to show their bellies. Kincaid roasted them all, against the room, his movements slowing as exhaustion and heat began to sap his strength and endurance.

He'd been running the flamethrower for hours, and was on his third tank.

"We'll wait for the door to cool down, then keep going." I said. It was the first words I'd said since I'd thrown the grenade in the den. There were slow nods, but that was all. We were hot, it was like a sauna in the hallways, and it had sapped everything from us.

Shads took out his canteen, popped the plastic tab on the top, and connected it to the small drinking hose on his mask before upending the canteen. Just the sight of it made my dry gummy mouth water, and I copied him, drinking from the warm water of the canteen. I cut mine with lemon juice, it made it tart, but it got rid of the gumminess, even under my gums.

I stepped through the charred remains and splashed a little on the door, and it didn't crackle away, just hissed and then ran down the door, the leading drops bubbling from the heat.

"Open the door, Donaldson." I told him. Whatever was painted on the door was covered with blood and worse, some obliterated by the fire, so it was a total unknown as to what lay beyond it.

The siren kicked on when Donaldson threw the lever, and the door took nearly three minutes to raise.

On the other side was a huge cavern, only a few of the lights kicking on automatically as the door raised, most of the lights little more than small glowing fireflies in the distance. The door ground back down as I panned my flashlight over the walls until I found the switches. Once again, huge brute force swivel switches that clacked loudly and sparked brightly in the darkness. The lights came on in banks, clacking loudly.

Idly, I wondered why they always did that, almost as if the light itself made the noise.

First thing that lit up was a bulldozer the size of a house, a huge behemoth with a blade over 15 feet high, heavy tracks over my head, an armored cab, painted an OD green and the tracks sagging due to the tension being released from the tracks to put it in storage mode.

It reminded me of 'Godzilla', its massive brother that I'd used to rake the roads at FSTS 317. I'd eaten in that cab, slept in it, even had Nancy ride me in the cab. It was part of the site, and FSTS 317 was part of 2/19th, and 2/19th was an inseparable part of who I was. Just seeing it brought back the sounds and smells of the FSTS.

I pulled off my mask, walking toward the bulldozer.

Behind me Kincaid popped the flamethrower a couple of times.

"I'm down to an eighth, Sergeant." Kincaid's voice was muffled.

"You'll be fine." I told him. "Natchez, you have the last tank, make sure Shads is ready when Kincaid runs out."

"They fear us now." Shads, and I could tell without looking that he'd pulled his mask too.

"Everyone except for Kincaid, get out of your suits. If we have to suit up again, we'll use the fresh ones I handed out in the Deep Storage Locker." I told them, stopping next to the bulldozer and running my hand on the massive gear toothed wheels, looking up at Taggart and Nancy, who sat on the top of the track, topless, glinting with baby oil as they tried to tan in the German sun. Taggart winked at me, and Nancy gave me a wicked smile as I walked around to the back, where Bomber and Jacks sat eating MRE's and bitching about having to pull the TOW missiles and replace them with TOW-II's.

Beyond them was FSTS-317, our home away from home. Bunkers full of chemical, nuclear, and conventional ammunition. Everything from rifle ammunition to FASCAM 8" artillery shells. Everything my assigned portion of 8th Infantry Division and Third Armored Division would need to push the Soviet Union back into the Fulda Gap, to roll them into East German territory and take the war to the Warsaw Pact. Behind me was the covered vehicle rows, the tin warehouses where body bags, concertina wire, uniforms, and everything outside of ammunition the units might need was stored, as well as the upper helipad, the fuel tanks, and the office building that the German Bundeswher guards hung out in when they weren't walking the wire. The building that had showers, my shitty little office, and a room with a gambling machine based off of three wheels that spun and if you hit the number right, dropped German Deutchmarks that we all slept in. The single bathroom and decon shower were lifesavers. After being dirty for almost all of Desert Shield/Storm, showers were almost better than sex.

The sun was setting behind me as I looked at the wire that separated my site from the 1K Zone. Unlike two of the other points, my point didn't have a shitty little building where the Soviet dudes hung out, just vehicles once in awhile.

"Sergeant?" A voice I didn't recognize startled me, and I whirled around.

The scene dissolved, leaving a serious and sad looking young man staring at me worriedly, ignoring the machete I brought up into guard position.

I was in a cave, lights handing down, wires and vents on the ceiling, surrounded by heavy duty construction vehicles, bags of cement, pallets of rebar, and stacks of varying sizes of lumber.

"Are you all right?" Shads, that was his name. Behind him Nancy snaked an arm around his waist and held him possessively, running her tongue up the back of his neck.

He didn't seem to notice.

"I'm... OK." It took me a minute to get that out.

"Corporal Donaldson wants to know what we're going to do next." He told me.

I shook myself, throwing off the hallucination. "I need to find medical. I gotta run some tests." I answered honestly.

"For what?" Donaldson asked, coming up next to him.

"I need to find out a few things about our friends." I said.

"They're flammable, that's all I need to know." Kincaid tossed in. "Flamethrowers rule!"

"How long is he going to stay in that suit?" Wilkins asked.

I grinned at Kincaid, if you wanted to be generous. "How bad you want in on what I do?"

"Why, what's up?" Kincaid asked.

"You'll have in one of those suits for five days, MOPP-4 for 72 hours, and you'll have to do live weapon decon as well as operate in a 'dusted' environment." I told him.

"Do I get to use a flamethrower some more?" He asked.

...the flame washed over the side of the house, burning away the wood, tearing a hole in the wall as the pressurized flame overcame the resistance of the suddenly charred and ashen wood...

Neverhappenedneverhappenedneverhappened

"Only when it gets bad." I told him.

"Fuck yeah, sign me up, Sergeant." He told me.

"Who the hell are you, Sergeant?" Natchez asked me. "Some Special Forces?"

I shook my head, resisting an urge to laugh at him. "No, I'm not an operator. I'm just a relic."

"Being a relic rocks." Kincaid said, snapping the flamethrower's igniter rapidly.

"Until you're over your shelf life." I told him, turning away and heading deeper into the cave.

We passed cars hanging from cables, tires deflated and beside them, doors cracked open to keep the rubber from turning into a solid mass. We passed the drums of oil, of gasoline, behind plywood and chicken-wire with "NO SMOKING 50 FEET" on it.

I didn't bother putting out my cigarette.

We passed by the disassembled temporary buildings where they were stacked, with signs saying what they were to be turned into. We passed massive tanks designed to be sunk into the ground with the fuel pumps and the piping next to them. We threaded our way between the crated books on pallets, until we came to the far wall. I closed my eyes, trying to visualize the twists and turns, then gave up and made a guess, heading left.

The lights began to turn off around us, bank after bank going dark within seconds of each other.

"We need to move." I said, picking up the pace as fast as I thought Kincaid could handle it. I knew he was flagging, but I wanted the flamethrower in case we got jumped again.

"Maybe he's flammable too." Kincaid said, breaking into a shuffling run.

"If Molotov's didn't work on him, I don't think the flamethrower will help either." I told them, ignoring the pain in my knee as I kept up the pace. The cold made my knee ache, the old breaks in my thighs blossom with bright sharp pain, and for a moment I was back in 2/19th.

...one hand wrapped around my ankle, squeezing tight enough that it felt like the bone was crushed like glass, cold flooding up the bones of my leg, freezing the marrow and making my balls ache. With a hard yank, my foot went in between the two steps, and I did the splits on the stairs, my groin muscles screaming...

...I screamed when my leg was torqued to the side, the sound of a green branch breaking sounding over my scream as my knee snapped...

...dark laughter filling the stairwell as Nancy and Bomber frantically pulled me free, Taggart shooting into the darkness of the stairwell below us...

"You tried fire?" Donaldson asked.

"We tried everything." I replied.

"You sure?" Kincaid asked, snapping the igniter.

"Knock yourself out." I told him.

Dark laughter rolled over us again, and I was suddenly away of the tiny snowflakes I hadn't really registered growing larger, falling from the ceiling of the cave.

"How can it be snowing?" Natchez asked.

"Because he owns down here now." I told them. "Now run."

We kept moving, until we hit the wall. I had no idea which was to go, but going left meant we'd be moving toward Tandy/Bishop, and I could no more head toward him than I could flap my arms and fly.

"He's coming, Ant, hurry." Taggart told me, waving at me from the darkness. She was dressed in full battle rattle, snow on her shoulders and helmet, and I followed the cat's-eyes on the back of her helmet into the darkness.

"Do you know where we're going?" Wilkins asked.

More laughter from deeper in the cave. My bone marrow shivered as cold washed through me.

"Away from that." Kincaid said, his shuffling feet picking up the pace.

Nancy and Bomber came out of the darkness next to me, ice and snow on their shoulders and in their hair, looking so much younger than I remembered. Nancy's face tight with fear and Bomber looking grimly determined. Nancy was carrying a fire axe, Bomber one of my Gerber's, and for a second my rifle was replaced by a bayonet. Then another, longer moment as the rough cavern wall beside us turned into baby-shit yellow painted cinderblocks.

Then I was moving through the hallway, staggering from cold and exhaustion, holding my stomach against the crippling pain that filled my abdomen, taking my breath away. I needed to shit. I needed to puke. I needed to do both at once, but most of all, I needed to stop, curl up in the snow on the hallway floor, and moan in pain.

"A little farther, Ant, you can make it, baby." Nancy told me.

"Can't." I said, staggering, swallowing around stomach acid. I'd already vomited my guts out at the end of Titty Territory, but I needed to puke again.

"We gotta keep moving, brother." Bomber told me. "Nancy will take care of you as soon as we get back to Cathy."

A heavy steel blast door floated out of the dark and snow, coated with a thin film of ice. "PRIMARY RECOVERY FACILITY" in heavy red stencil under the thin glaze of ice.

Bomber and Nancy exploded into snow, swirling around me before the wind whipping through the cavern tore them away from me. I had the urge to grab at the flakes, try to keep them with me just a second longer. The loss of the bayonet punched me in the stomach, an echo of the ruptured appendix I'd been staggering with. It didn't matter that a bayonet was in its sheathe at the small of my back, it wasn't the same without my crew.

Phantom pain still twinged as I ran toward the door, the others keeping up with me.

...look at me, brother, just keep looking at me, Nancy's got you...

...fight, Ant, fight. Stay awake, stay with me, Ant, Nancy found it...