Private Monkey Ghost Story

Chapter 1

I stepped off the bus into three fucking feet of snow. I was the only one on the bus, and the driver had laughed viciously when he slammed the door to the bus and roared off in a cloud of diesel fumes.

The building I was looking at was old, white, and covered with snow. It looked vaguely familiar, and there was a path carved through the snow, which went from three feet where I was standing, to over my head.

Holy Christ, what did I get myself into?

BOOM BOOM BOOM! Three rapid-fire explosions shook the trees and caused flakes of snow to drift down from their nearly-bare branches. I looked around, but no sign of where it came from. Sighing, I grabbed my duffle out of the snow and headed through the carved snow channel to the building. While I was walking, there was another set of explosions. That would explain why all the snow was on the ground but the branches of the trees were bare.

Inside the building wasn't much warmer, but at least Class-As were warm. I had on my nice, shiny E-2 rank, awarded for excellence during training at AIT, and was all giddy and proud of myself.

It took a while of wandering around, but I found a woman, who offered to call my unit and have them send someone down to get me. She told them I'll be in the cantina in the building, and then showed me where it was. She commented on my wedding ring, telling me that post housing is at a premium, and the nearest town is a little over four miles from post.

Great, I'm in Sleepy fucking Hollow. No biggee, I joined up to avoid a nightly ass-pounding in jail. Not to say I wasn't going to join anyway, it's just I ended up in the custody of the US Army a bit earlier than planned.

So I was sitting there eating nachos and drinking soda when the guy showed up. He looked shit-ass miserable, wearing Mickey-Mouse boots, a fucking parka, and cold weather trousers.

"You Monkey?" he asked, moving over to the radiator and standing over it.

"Yes. You from the unit?"

"Yup. Finish your nachos," he told me. He then went over and ordered a beer. He sat down across from me, cracked open the beer, took a long pull off of it and then belched.

"Who'd you piss off to end up here?" he asked me.

"Nobody. I was actually assigned here after AIT. Everyone else going to Germany had orders for 21st Replacement, I had orders for here," I told him. "Why? What's so bad except the snow?"

"Counting you and me, the unit total now sits at eighteen people," he grunted. "You had to piss off someone."

"Eighteen? As in ten plus eight?" The thought boggled my mind.

"Yeah. The other two hundred are supposed to be along in the next few months. You think that's fucked up, wait till you see our barracks." He finished off the beer, snagged a couple of my last nachos, then stood up and buttoned his parka.

"Let's go, kid." I caught his rank when he grabbed his cold-weather cap off the table. E-4, but he looked about nine thousand years old. I silently followed him outside and into a Chevy Blazer, which he fired up, and we pulled out in the streets.

"It gets cold her about August, there's usually snow on the ground by late September, and it stays till about March or April, from what I've heard from guys who have been here," he told me. "Most of the buildings were built by the Nazis in World War II. For example, our barracks were built in the 1930s and refurbished last month. Here, let's grab your TA-50 so you have your cold weather gear; I don't want you to freeze to death in the middle of the night." I nodded, followed him in, and we rousted a German guy reading a porn mag to give me my equipment. He didn't make me sign anything—didn't even have a list; he just handed me all this shit and waved us out the door.