Isolation & Fear (Damned of the 2/19th Book Seven)

Why Do They Always Say That?

War Fighter Tunnels
Secure Area
Alfenwehr, Western Germany
11 January, 1988
1900 Hours

Groom came in and sat next to me, chewing on her lower lip. She had one of the XM-16E1's in her hand, the chrome bolt gleaming softly in the yellow-tinged lights of the officer's room we shared together. I sat up, letting the sheet and blanket puddle around my waist. She glanced at me, then back at the rifle, running her index fingertip up and down the lower receiver, right below the magazine well.

"What's up?" I asked, leaning forward and kissing her cheek.

She shrugged, tapping the loaded rifle sitting across her thighs. "Just, got an odd feeling."

That made me frown. I'd been busy taking care of the preggos and the rape victims pretty exclusively. I seemed to be staggering from one "emergency" to another, never really having time to catch my breath. It didn't help that Quintin's little baby was born blue and had to be resuscitated.

We got lucky, she lived.

Quintin almost bled out to boot. Leaving me with an invalid mother who was still slightly shocky that I had monitored for twenty four hours straight, and a baby that needed monitored constantly since she was 3 weeks premature.

Groom stared at me for a long moment, still chewing on her lip, then sighed, her shoulders slumping as she relaxed slight.

"I can't find Gordons anywhere," she said softly.

"What?" I frowned, trying to remember the last time I'd seen him.

"I looked. We're talking a full sweep. Didn't tell anyone who I was looking for, just told them I was doing a light and heat check," She said, looking around. She nodded at the closed door to our little apartment. "I checked the entire War Fighter complex, even checked the logs to see if any entrances were opened."

There was a moment of silence. "Not a trace. I found his signature on some of the check-ins and security checks, but I checked that against some of his older signatures, and they don't come close to matching."

I thought about it for a moment. I hadn't seen him in over a week, not since I'd checked him out as part of the monthly health and welfare checks and cleared him for duty. He'd been getting out on a Chapter-11, a failure to adapt, since he had been consistently overweight, unable to meet the body fat standards on a tape test, and had failed three PT tests in a row in a year and a half. He'd dropped weight in the War Fighter Tunnels, going from 5' 10" and 190 pounds to a lean 5' 10" and 165 in the last few months. He'd been considering staying in the Army, and I'd ran a mental health test on him, coming back with far better numbers than he had had previously, so I'd signed off on a re-examination of his fit for duty status.

"That's weird," I told Groom, looking around at our little apartment. My underwear was slung over the back of a chair, my uniform and the scrubs I'd been wearing in a puddle beside the door, my socks and boots half-kicked under the table.

I was getting sloppy and messy.

"A proper lady keeps her living space as clean as her body should be," my grand-mother teased playfully in my memories.

There was nowhere for him to go. The War Fighter Tunnels were extensive, but not exactly built so people could hide in them. That was deliberate on the part of the designers, you didn't want places where people could hide.

"Let me get dressed," I told her, standing up and stretching. The blanket fell off of me, and Groom gave me one of those smiles that made my knees go weak.

"You know, it can wait a little while," Groom said, reaching up and rubbing my fat ass. Goosebumps erupted on my skin and I shivered pleasantly.

"We start that, and Gordons will never get found," I laughed, moving forward.