End of Winter (Rewrite & Expansions into Book Four)

Sleep Tight

"I'd been a small child.
"Still and silent."
"But Alfenwehr and Atlas taught me rage."

2/19th Special Weapons Group Barracks
Restricted Area Bravo, Alfenwehr West Germany
Late Winter- 3 February, 1985
Day 2 of Repairs
Day 2 of the Third Incident
2100 Hours

Parker had put on his shirt, sitting on the bed and watching me sit down in the chair after stripping off my brown T-shirt. Stokes was leaning against the desk, her arms folded under her breasts as she watched with guarded eyes. Captain Woolworth sat in the chair facing me, staring at my chest. Her two helper monkeys...

they have names

so do other people's pet rocks...

stared with her. On my chest were the marks she'd made to track the bruising on my chest, the same way she'd marked Parker.

"This is impossible," she said. She reached forward and touched my bare skin with her fingertips. "It feels like you're running a fever. Maybe an infection of some type?"

She reached into her bag, fumbling a moment, then came up with a thermometer.

"That better not be a rectal one," I told her, smiling.

She shuddered and looked away. "No, Corporal, it isn't."

"Don't do that, Ant," Stokes said.

I stopped smiling. Nobody could say I hadn't tried to be friendly.

"Open," she said. I obeyed, letting her put the thermometer under my tongue.

She looked over my chest again, reaching out and touching the pink puckered marks where she'd pulled the two draining tubes out of my flesh earlier. She shook her head, glancing at her watch, then put her fingers under my chin to have me tilt my head back.

"Your neck had bruising from what looked like strained muscles," she started.

"Guy had him in a chokehold before I bayoneted him," Parker broke in.

She shook her head again. "The bruising is just gone. Same with your chest and shoulder," she shook her head again, then pulled the thermometer out of my mouth, glancing at it, rolling it slightly so the mercury caught the light.

The burning tingling in my chest spread for a moment then dropped.

"Ninety-nine point two. Within standard deviation," she mused.

"Ant's always healed fast," Stokes said, lighting a cigarette. She exhaled blue smoke into the dim light and shrugged. "It's startling when you first see it. You should see how much he eats. Even when he's not injured he eats enough for two people."

"Really?" Captain Woolworth picked up the abbreviated chart and looked at it. "Profile for triple rations," she looked at me again. "You're eating three to five thousand calories a day?"

"Yes, ma'am," I told her honestly.

"Some times he eats MRE's in between meals," Stokes helpfully offered.

She looked at where she'd weighed me on a bathroom scale she was having one of her assistants cart around.

"You weigh two-hundred and twelve pounds," she mused. "At six foot tall. Standard weight range for a nineteen year old soldier," she started.

"Eighteen," Stokes corrected. She grinned at me. "Paperwork error. He was born in sixty-six."

I glared at her and she laughed.

"Eighteen then. Even then, your normal range for body weight max should be one-ninety," she mused. She looked at the measurements she'd taken to measure my body fat. "You're within body fat percentages though. A little on the high side but well within tolerance."