Private Monkey Ghost Story

Chapter 7

Murderers. Thieves. Thugs. That was us.

I passed out around nineteen hundred and slept through the night. We didn't have fire guard, we didn't bother with CQ or ACQ or even duty driver. We all got drunk, some of us drunk enough to puke in the trash cans before going back to drinking.

I woke without a hangover.

I was angry when I woke. The anger I was used to—I was always angry. Todd fucking with me, the engineer of the Crazy Train fucking with me. Anger was part of my life. It was cold, and I was pissed off.

I stomped over to the CQ desk and dug through the drawers till I found the map for the building. Looking at it, I located the main breaker boxes.

In the furnace room.

Fine, if that's how it was going to be, then that's how it would be. I refused to be intimidated by dead Nazi scumbags. I was too old to believe in ghosts or hauntings. That shit was for little kids. I was a goddamn man.

I replaced the batteries in my flashlight and headed down the hallway and to the stairwell.

I paused on the mid-way landing down. The creepy feeling had washed over me, but I pushed it away and decided there was no way I was going to be scared by some fuckheads.

Above me, the door to the stairwell opened. When it closed, the lights in the stairwell went out.

I rolled my shoulders, a habit I'd picked up, and pushed my way through the darkness till I found the stairwell exit. Growling to myself, I pushed out and into the hallway, and found the handle of the door that led into the furnace room.

It took me a minute to unlock it. There were muted impact noises from the stairwell, but I ignored them. There were three windows in that stairwell, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that one of them had air leaking and making it thump.

I opened the door to the furnace room, and the lights turned on in the hallway, flooding the area with hard white light.

Fuck you. I ain't afraid of you.

I moved into the room, following the sketch I'd made of the map in my little green notebook. How the fuck did we miss it? It was between the water heater and the furnace. The gritty black dirt made crunching noises under my boots, and I could hear the whisper of rats in the darkness.

A thread of dark thought bubbled up to the surface of my mind. If I was to trip, and get knocked out, would they come to eat me?

Followed by: "How the fuck did they survive all these years out here?"

I didn't want to know.

I found the breaker boxes. Three huge metal boxes, with words in German written on them. I didn't read German, and I didn't care. I opened the box and stood there staring.

Fuses. Fucking fuses and each box had a large switch. The kind that you grab the wooden handle and move it up or down.

I used the flashlight to look around and found a box of fuses on top of the middle box. Looking carefully, I checked each fuse through the glass. Often having to rub the glass clean.

I heard murmuring behind me and ignored it. I heard footsteps and ignored them. I heard breathing and blew it off. I was a US Army soldier; I'd be goddamned if I was going to run away just because it was dark and creepy. Of course it was; it was a goddamn basement of a fifty-year-old building, so of course it was creepy.

I had to replace six fuses, and two of the bus-bars needed thrown back. It needed about a dozen more fuses, but I'd gone through the box I'd found.