Cold Hatred (Book 2 & 3 of the Damned of the 2/19th) -Updated and Rewritten

Chapter 7.2

((I broke this chapter up into several parts since it is very long. Hang tite, there's lots of stuff coming down the pipe))

"Yeah. He tried pulling that 'I want respect, waah' crap on me a little bit ago," I told her, taking the bottle and uncorking it.

"Yeah, he was bitching about that here, so we sent him off on an errand while we started knocking out the medical supplies," Bomber told me.

"How's it coming?" I asked, pouring the first drink.

"Eh, we're not in a big hurry here. It's mostly figuring out what all we used during that shit that went down with the psycho and what we still need," Bomber answered while I cracked the can of Coke and poured it over the Wild Turkey I'd stashed in my desk the night before when I'd gotten on after a nightmare where it had been Nancy laying on the lower helipad at Atlas, not Westlin. It had taken me almost an hour to wash that image out of my head with alcohol and cold as I paced the North and South Hammerhead Hall in the dark with a whiskey bottle and a cigarette.

"Roger that," I answered, handing him a drink and pouring the next. "How's your leg, Stokes?" I asked. The large Amazon walked with a limp she'd carry the rest of her life. She'd gone to a party, let her drunken boyfriend get behind the wheel, and he'd crashed into a van in less than four blocks. The crash had been brutal, trapping the sober and conscious Stokes in the wreck for two hours, killing a family of five and leaving a six month old child an orphan missing a leg. They'd pried Stokes out of the wreck with the Jaws of Life, and she'd damn near died in the ER. She'd broken most of her ribs on her left side, broken her arm in three places, broken her jaw, and shattered her left leg. It had taken nine hours of surgery and six metal rods and forty-two pins in her leg to put her back together. Her boyfriend had gone partly through the windshield and took almost two weeks to die in the hospital.

She'd been ready to plead guilty at her court-martial, but instead of doing what she had expected and court-martialing her, sending the second woman to ever graduated NBC Warfare Field Specialist school to Leavenworth, the Army had quietly put her in 2/19th rather than lose out on over two million dollars' worth the training and surgery to put her back together.

The pain in her leg with every step reminded her every day that she'd let her boyfriend drive and he killed a family. She took her time at Alfenwehr as a penance, and to her the knowledge she'd die when the Red Steamroller rolled through the Fulda Gap was nothing more than what she deserved.

Nothing less than any of us deserved, from what I'd learned about my fellow inmates of 2/19th Special Weapons Group. Murders. Thieves. Drug addicts. Child molesters. Rapists. Not to mention just plain fuckups like me and Bomber.

"It's not bad," she told me with a smile. "How's the head?"

"Aches," I admitted, handing Nancy's drink to her. I hefted the bottle. "How much?"

"Three fingers. And your eyesight?" she asked.

The bottle gurgled as I put about three fingers of Wild Turkey into the glass. "Same ol' same ol'," I admitted. I handed off her glass and poured myself a drink. I popped my neck, leaning my head first one way, then the other to ease off the ache I could feel, but the ache right above where the lizard lived hung around. Just like it had since the maniac with the axe had popped my skull.

"Any news about our lost lamb?" Nagle asked.

I told them what I'd seen. There was no mocking, no doubt, just questions about details, each of them taking their time to see if they could tease something out of my memory that I'd missed at the time. It was Stokes who asked several times if I'd seen any blood drops on the pavement. Nancy asked whether or not I could spot the Motor Pool through the snow and how bad the visibility was. Bomber asked pointedly about the lock, and I admitted to knowing how it had been done. Someone had put a chunk of tempered steel between the chain link and the top of the hasp and put pressure on it until the interior gave it up. Something my father had taught all of us kids.