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

It May Be Hell, but It's Our Hell

"If God had intended me to be good looking, he'd have made
me a girl. I'm a boy, so my face is just to keep the front of
my skull warm and that's it."

Chapter Two
2/19th Special Weapons Group
Restricted Area, Western Germany
Late Winter
1830 Hours, 22 January 1986
Day 9 of Repairs
Day 1 of the Second Incident

I stepped out of the shower and turned to face the sink with the mirror above it. From the mirror, a reddish-blond guy stared back. Ugly, with a scar at his hairline above his left eye, scars on both lips. On my right shoulder was a thick upraised scar, still forming, with staples still stuck in the flesh. I'd lost a lot of weight and it showed.

I put my hands on the sink and leaned toward my reflection, squinting and glaring at it. "You are a waste of a human being. Nobody likes you. You are worthless beyond the fact that you will die so that someone better than you will survive. You will never be worth anything more than whatever good your death can do. Nobody will ever love you, everyone can barely tolerate you, and you deserve nothing good," I told my reflection. "You will die alone, and nobody will know or care that you are gone. You are just a boy."

With a last snarl I turned away, grabbing a towel to wrap around my waist and my glasses from where I'd left them on the sink. The brown towel wasn't too uncomfortable, not that I gave a damn about comfort, but the glasses gave me back my sight.

The bathroom door squeaked when I opened it up so I could step into the small hallway from the room door to the main part of the room. On the right and left of the hallway were wall lockers for us to store our civilian clothing, valuable, military uniforms, and TA-50. Beyond that little hallway was the room I shared with two friends. A room that had been stripped down to nothing by a maniac and had its windows shattered by people pushed beyond the brink of caring about survival.

Plywood covered the windows that we had broken, just like we'd put up in every other room in the massive barracks. The heater was pinging softly, heat radiating from it to bring the room up to a sweltering 65 degrees Fahrenheit that had all three of us stripped down to mitigate what felt like high temperatures to us. The only thing on the shelves were the AD&D books I'd bought from the PX in Freiburg and a crystal Porsche that Nagle had bought me for Christmas from God knew where. There were some posters I'd pulled out of a Fangoria magazine and a cloth wall hanging of Eddie from Iron Maiden's The Trooper hanging over the desk. Above the bunk beds, in between the picture of Captain Rhodes (who seemed a lot better than the last four Group Commanding Officers they'd sent us) and a shot of Bub the Zombie was a small 11x16 picture of a rose garden torn from a magazine. That lonely garden was Nancy's contribution to the decorations. We'd jokingly mocked her about it when she first pinned it up, but now it felt soothing. It made our pretty stark room feel warmer somehow.

It wasn't Atlas, but it was the almost home. More of a home than where we had been, and as far as we knew the last home we'd know. Any time we wanted to doubt it, all we had to do is look at Nancy's face, Bomber's stomach and thigh, my shoulder and thigh, and the dogtags from my dead troops that I kept in the top right drawer of my desk.

None of us were getting off this mountain alive. If the Russians didn't kill us, if our own leaders didn't kill us...

The mountain would.

I paused at the entry of the main room, wet and dripping from a 10-minute hot shower, my new glasses feeling weird on my nose, wrapped in a towel and steaming despite the warmth of the room. I looked at my two best friends and smiled.

Bomber leaned back in the chair, tilting just to the point where gravity would snatch his ass and drop him flat on the tile, his right hand lifting the bottle and drinking deeply from it. In his other hand, dropped down beside the chair with a lit cigarette in it. He'd moved out of his old room, choosing to move in with us rather than stay by himself.