All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

71: Patrol

Posey woke with a start to her name being said with increasingly little patience. "Duckie. Hey, Duckie. Wells. Wells. Sergeant Wells!"

"Hm?" Her eyes shot open, darting wildly around her in the search for context.

"Dike wants you on patrol," Tab said. He was crouched in a tiny ball at the edge of her foxhole, shivering where he looked down at her as he awaited her response.

"Hm?" she asked again. She rubbed at her eyes, blinking rapidly to clear away the bleariness. Sleep didn't come easily in the freezing cold and it always seemed that just as she had dozed off someone needed her for something.

"Dike wants you out on patrol," Tab repeated, glancing about him a moment before turning back to her. "Says you can pick who else goes."

"Me?" Posey was suddenly wide awake, bewildered. "Why would I pick who goes?"

Tab shrugged. He looked as though he might have found their commanding officer's incompetence funny if it weren't putting their lives on the line everyday. "No idea. He said he wanted a sharpshooter, asked Lip who he had. Lip said it was you or Shifty so Dike chose you, said you can pick the others. 'S all I know."

"Fucking Christ," Posey said, pinching the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. "Okay, Tab, thanks. I suppose he wants it right away?"

"Sure does."

"Right."

Posey breathed in deeply before planting her hands and pushing herself up. As soon as she was up on higher ground she wrapped both arms around herself once again, gripping onto handfuls of her ODs about her ribs in an attempt to keep her blood flowing. "Happen to know where Bill is?"

Tab shrugged, curled in on himself in a way almost identical to her. "Beats me. Don't know where anyone is if they're not in their foxhole."

Posey sighed, nodding. Everyone looked the same out here. People tried to stay in their foxholes where possible - the best chance at survival if they were hit with a surprise attack and just slightly warmer than above ground, though 'just slightly' was significantly better than nothing - and when they weren't in them everyone kept their helmet firmly on their head and their chin tucked into whatever clothing they had around their necks. Posey was still in hopeful pursuit of a scarf. At this point, she was considering ripping Dike's off of him the moment she next laid eyes on him; with the amount of time he spent away from the line it wasn't like he needed it much, anyway.

"Well," Posey began, trying to keep her teeth from chattering so that her words would reach Tab over the howling of the wind, "if you see him can you let him know he's coming on the patrol with me? He's my first pick."

"Will do."

"Thanks, Tab."

"You got it, Duckie."

As Tab went off to do whatever it was Tab did these days, Posey's next order of business was finding Compton. Whilst the CO of the company might have said that it was up to her to pick the patrol, that wasn't how things were usually done. Really, Posey knew Dike was just trying to weasel his way out of having to make any decisions, but she didn't want to get a reprimand later on for picking a patrol squad out when it wasn't really her place. As the old military adage went, shit rolled downhill, and she didn't want to get on Winters' bad side because of Dike and his ineptitude.

Posey wandered around between the foxholes, crouching down over one or two and asking after Compton. It was only when she got to Toye that she finally got an answer. "He's checking in on some of the guys. Just left here to head over that way," Toye told her, throwing a gesture to his left. His eyes were set firmly on the line ahead of him, only deviating to check she'd heard him. "What do you need him for?"