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

Survival Core Interrupt

TIME/DATE ERROR
Daytime, Winter
GPS LOCATION ERROR
Templar Fortress, Alfenwehr
CPU VOLTAGE SPIKES

The walls were raw rock, often carved with sigils and crude pictures. Most of them were to saints or religious figures. The Templars, after all, were a religious organization. The ice was left behind, the bare rock slowly appearing, until just frost glittering stone remained.

Two passages led off, but those went to rooms that we had figured out were "ready rooms" where men had stood on guard.

Bad things had happened here, but it was a shelter I could trust.

My brain was still clicking through my options, making plans, focusing on what was in front of me and the future, rather than bothering to process everything that happened.

That was for another day. Actually, for other nights, where I would be helpless and live through it over and over again, this time feeling the emotions that a normal person would feel.

But right now I was a weapon. Twisted steel and sex appeal.

All the ladies love a killer.

They'd really love me.

I'd gotten Little-Bit killed out there in the cold and dark.

The hallway twisted a few times then opened up into a larger area. We'd figured out it was the nave, identified what had been Jesus on the Cross before whatever had gone down had happened.

Water had oozed from a crack in the stone above the carved out cross and frozen, eternally frozen, preserving the bloody ragged skeleton crucified in place of Christ for all eternity.

Through the nave, into the next passage. The larger caverns/chambers I couldn't risk. I needed heat and small spaces, and I knew exactly where.

Anyone who didn't know how innovative and productive the ancient world was would have been surprised by the complexity of the Templar fortress carved into the living stone of the caves of Alfenwehr. Multiple chambers, smoke venting, a warm spring where pressure and something inside the mountain (probably hate) heated the water before it poured from a crack the size of the thickness of my index finger, a stone carved kitchen.

We'd repurposed it.

To fight and win on the nuclear battlefield.

The door we'd built was still in place. Heavy, steel, stolen from the barracks repairs, with a padlocked chain. The lock was thick, heavy, case steel wrapped around a half-inch bolt.

I grabbed it and yanked.

It popped open.

We'd never had the keys to it.

The door squealed when I opened it, and the air felt different. Less oppressive, thicker and richer, more welcoming and comforting.

"FINISH THE FIGHT" was written on the wall. I'd drawn a mushroom cloud and the silhouette of a blasted city-scape below it, with "2/19th Special Weapons" below it.

Despite our nihilism and rage, we still love our unit like it was the parents who had rejected us, like it was the society and nation we guarded but hated us.

We'd layered lumber taken from pallets onto the floor and my boots made soft thumps on them as I crossed the wooden floor to the vast fireplace. The Templars who had originally built the place had done an amazing job, working with stone and mortar, and the venting for it took it to somewhere on the rocks above the edge of the cliff.

I carefully prepared the fire. Tinder first. Old dryer lint, with thin slices of wood. My zippo caught the dryer lint immediately and I carefully nursed the tinder into a full blown blaze in a few minutes.