Author's Note: Annie gets up close and personal with a particular member of the Joes, and learns a few things about how intimidating a request for bacon can be.
Before beginning—yes, I realize that a military kitchen probably wouldn't allow a dog in. But the Joes seem to have a very casual attitude towards Junkyard in general; his very first appearance shows him going on a slobber attack in the mess hall on the Jane, and he certainly seems to have full liberty of the base. Short Stack has only had experience with regular dogs—she doesn't know Junkyard.
Also, regarding the issue of stripes: a lot of Joes don't seem to wear them while they're in BDUs, though whether that's a tactical decision or an accident on the part of the illustrator I'm not sure. I'd guess it's a bit like Hawk not always wearing his stars—in the Pit, where practically everybody's a sergeant, the chain of command can get a bit tangled, and wearing your stripes would seem pointless when everyone knows everyone anyway.
And that leads me to my final point—a thank-you to CrystalOfEllinon, who kindly pointed out an error I'd made in the mode of address for private to sergeant. Thanks! I hope I've fixed it satisfactorily. And if anybody spots any other errors, I'd appreciate you letting me know about those too, so I can clean them up.
Rating: T for language.
Disclaimer: G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.
Chapter Three: The KP is Always Right
The Pit kitchens fairly gleamed. Polished steam tables and rows of shining equipment reflected the stark white walls, and the tile under their feet was dove-gray and scrubbed to perfection. A dozen other soldiers, not strictly quartermasters but assigned to the kitchen on an informal basis, were already clattering around and warming up the stoves. Aside from the fact that they'd swapped out their desert boots for rubber clogs, the whole place looked like pretty much every other base kitchen she'd served in—albeit one so clean she could probably perform surgery there.
Though the Joes did some things backwards, Annie was on her home turf here. The quartermaster-cooks, herself included, would each take control of a station and a group of soldiers. It was no secret that Short Stack would be on pancake duty.
Her assistants today were six fellow greenshirts, three of whom were assigned to the kitchen as a rule and three of whom, to judge by their grumbling, had pulled KP for doing something spectacularly stupid where Beach Head could see them. Annie might have been the greenest of the green as far as the Joes were concerned, but she knew her way around a kitchen. She immediately collared two of the biggest and sent them running for the heavy ingredients—flour, milk, sugar, baking powder, and (to her greenshirts' obvious surprise) a few ounces of white vinegar.
Whiskey Down had made a few things clear the day before while he was giving her the initial tour. The Joes, whoever they were or whatever they did that was so damn classified, got fed well. And with a smaller base than usual, there wasn't so much of a call for the hundred-gallon drums of freeze-dried food substitute that got ordered up when there were five or ten thousand mouths to feed. Pancake mix was right out, but so was haute cuisine. The Joe kitchens existed somewhere in the middle between five stars from Zagat's and five-syllable preservatives on the labels.
That didn't mean subtlety was called for, though. The pancake ingredients went into several huge steel bowls, each half the size of those drums that she so disliked, and burly Army grunts were set to the mixing and sifting. Annie hefted a five-gallon jug of milk, staggering a little under the weight, and dumped the whole thing into another giant bowl. A measure of vinegar followed it. Maybe somewhere, the giant Roadblock would be wincing, his chef-sense telling him that someone was making buttermilk substitute in bulk. But that was a diner trick: mixed fast, tasted good to the grunts, and probably wouldn't make anyone throw up.
Annie grinned a little as she threw herself into the work. Discard the empty jug—time for cleanup when the rush was over. Don't bother "folding" the wet ingredients into the dry, just dump it in there—it really made no difference. She could hear Murphy shouting at someone, and the hiss of the long griddle as the first of the day's sixty pounds of sausage and bacon began to fry. Warmth, and the delicious smell of breakfast, filled the huge kitchen. This was the sort of thing she was good at. Lunatic DIs and cracked claims about ninjas were forgotten as she worked, content in what she did best.
Then she turned around, and promptly fell over the dog.
It wasn't a big dog, but when Annie found herself on the floor with it crouched over her, her first impression was that she'd been hit by the offspring of a Labrador and a Mack truck. She yelped and tried to shove it off, but the dog dodged her flailing arm and sat down firmly on her stomach, knocking the wind out of her.
"There's a fucking dog in here!" she managed to wheeze, slapping ineffectively at the monster. Something horribly familiar, warm and damp, coated her hands—oh god, had it bitten her? Was she bleeding? "Help!"
"JUNKYARD!" someone yelled. Probably not the word most commonly associated with kitchens. Annie pulled at the animal's collar in an attempt to get him off her, realizing belatedly that the stuff on her hands was actually drool.
"Hey, you!" the voice shouted. "Stop yanking on my dog!"
She thought she heard Whiskey Down laugh, but the sensation was overriden by the dog's enthusiastic attempts to lick her face. With a groan, she rolled over and managed to shove it off her, but that didn't seem to deter it; it just bounced back to its feet and went for her again, evidently concerned about the fact that she didn't have enough slobber on her face yet. Annie leapt back, scrabbling on the counter for a pan or something to throw at it.
Her attempts to defend herself against the ravening beast were rudely interrupted by an equally rude man, who stampeded into her line of vision and proceeded to glare the dog into submission. He was wearing the by-now familiar Joe greens and had no stripes, but seemed to labor under the delusion that he needed a helmet, goggles, and a muzzle to work in the kitchens.
"Junkyard!" he shouted again, and the dog retreated slightly. "Down! I said DOWN! I mean it!"
The dog paused, considered, flicked its ears forward, and—Annie would swear—grinned at the irritated man.
"Whiskey? Uh, Whiskey?" she called, trying not to make eye contact with the worryingly affectionate dog or the man in the muzzle. "There's a dog. In the kitchen."
Whiskey Down looked up from the grill, never pausing as he flipped hash browns onto it. "He didn't get into the bacon, did he?" he said, a little too casually to be entirely serious. "Junk's supposed to be watching his weight."
"What? No. Whiskey Down, there is a dog. In the kitchen." Annie couldn't believe she had to even mention it. "That's a blatant health violation! What would the senior QM say?"
"Hey, wait a minute!" the muzzled man snapped. He tossed a milk bone to Junkyard, who caught it eagerly and began to chow down—right in the middle of the clean kitchen floor, Annie noticed, wincing. "Are you saying my dog's dirty?"
Annie stepped back, wondering if the man was rabid. He sure looked about ready to bite. "He's a dog," she said carefully. "Dogs are not allowed in kitchens. You have to get that thing out of here."
"He's not making any trouble. I'll give him his squeaky rubber bone." This was clearly as far as the man was willing to go for the sake of compromise; any insult to his dog seemed to be an insult to him. Never mind that his damn dog was taking precious time out of her cooking schedule-
"Look, private," she said as icily as she could. "Dogs drool. They bite. They shed and shit and do things like jump on unsuspecting cooks and get dog hair in the pancake batter. Get it out of here, now. And if you're not on KP, get yourself out of here too!"
"Oh, he's on KP," Chopper called from across the kitchen. He was slicing fruit at lightning speed, but seemed to have no qualms about taking his eyes off the giant knife to watch the show. "He was supposed to be in your group, but Junkyard had to go for walkies. Oh, and for future reference? He's a sergeant."
Annie froze.
Oh, hell.
"Um," she began eloquently. Mutt's eyes were narrowed, and Junkyard's tongue lolled out of his mouth in seeming amusement. "I. Um. Sergeant."
Then Mutt turned away, muttering "Goddamn greenshirts," and Annie breathed again. He patted his dog's head, producing enthusiastic slobber from the animal.
She wanted to shout at somebody, frankly. How was this not a blatant violation of every health regulation in the book? But Whiskey Down seemed totally unconcerned with the dog's presence, and Eighty-Six was doing that increasingly annoying "told ya so" wink across the kitchen anyway. Was this the unit for terminally insane officers, then? Did they mean "specialist" as in "Johnny rides the short bus because he's special"? Or perhaps the head QM had killed someone and Junkyard had dug the body up. Hell, considering how Mutt looked, she wouldn't have put it past him to do the digging himself. Probably hunting for his own squeaky rubber bone.
But . . . dammit, breakfast was about to begin. Annie hastily wrenched a few sterilizing wipes out of the ever-present box on the counter, gave her face and hands a quick scrub, and then turned back to her sadly uncompleted pancake batter. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mutt ordering Junkyard into the corner—where the animal made himself comfortable on, for Christ's sake, a sack of flour. Annie considered banging her head against the counter, but that would've been yet another health violation.
Finish mixing the ingredients. Divide the batter amongst the greenshirts and haul it all down to the far end of the long electric griddle, far enough away from the bacon to avoid mixing sweet and savory. Set them to pouring and shaping. Ignore the fact that the crazy man with the dog was now right behind her.
How the hell did a sergeant wind up on KP, anyway?
Though come to think of it, that dog might have something to do with it.
"Short Stack!" Chopper called out. Annie wanted to pretend she couldn't hear him, but that wouldn't be professional. Not when the breakfast rush was starting in fifteen minutes.
"Yes?" she said as she flipped over the first of the pancakes.
"Mutt needs to work too, you know."
Mutt apparently disagreed with this, but the look he shot Chopper seemed not to register on the cook. For Annie, pretending to be oblivious was looking better and better. The man even smelled like dog. But if he really was a sergeant, and he was supposed to be on KP, then she was risking both charges of insubordination and "contributing to the delinquency of a fellow soldier" if she didn't give him something to do. Maybe, if she was lucky, that would turn out to be one of those regulations that the whole Joe base seemed to be ignoring with abandon . . . but for now . . . hell.
At least she could keep him out of the danger zone. "Scrub," she said, pointing to the now-empty batter bowls. Mutt grumbled something, but the muzzle made it impossible to hear, something Annie was extremely grateful for. He grabbed the first of the bowls off the counter with evident ill will and headed over to the sink where, thank God, he would be in close contact with hot water and soap. Annie turned her attention back to the pancakes. In stark contrast to the rest of her day so far, they were behaving exactly like they ought to be.
She moved down the line, overseeing the greenshirts as they flipped the pancakes. The first batch was about done. Pull those off the griddle, then; put 'em in the steel trays that would help keep them warm on the steam tables; send one of the greenies to bring the tray out to the servers on the line. Everybody else had settled into the rhythm of the work, and there was no more chatter. When Mutt dropped a bowl on the linoleum, sending an echoing clang bouncing off the walls of the kitchen, Annie was the only one that jumped.
By the time the fourth tray of pancakes went out, though, she could hear more than just the general bustle of the kitchen. Voices were coming in through the open door—cheerful shouts, a variety of curses in different languages and accents, and a female voice coolly informing someone what exactly would happen if said someone didn't stop using all the miniature cream cups to build a replica of "Castle Destro." As Annie started loading up the fifth tray, Shingle caught her by the elbow.
"I think your greenies have got things well in hand," Shingle said reassuringly. Annie knew that he would probably recognize it if they did: Shingle claimed to have been a chef in civilian life, even if his official designation still made him a grenadier, and his was certainly the most professional of the attitudes in the kitchen. "It's your first day; why don't you go out and join the serving staff for a bit?"
"But, sir-"Annie began reluctantly. "Cooks aren't supposed to leave their stations during-"
"Look, Short Stack. Think of it as the ounce of prevention that's worth a pound of cure."
Annie opened her mouth to cite the rules again, but another crash from the direction of Mutt—Sergeant Mutt, up to his elbows in dirty dishwater, his dog now lounging at his feet—made her think twice. If the health regulations and dress codes were already shot to hell, who was to say that the rule about station maintenance wasn't out the window too? "Yes, sir," she said resignedly, hefting the fifth tray of pancakes.
Orders were orders.
* * *
The chow hall was set up a bit like a college cafeteria. Military men and women jostled into line behind each other, holding out their trays for food or pulling them back when they didn't want any of that particular dish. The servers put each steel tray into a slot in the steam table, which would keep the food warm until the tray was empty—whereupon it would go back to the kitchen and become the concern of Sgt. Mutt. Annie pulled a pair of sterile gloves from the box by the door and put them on, gravitating as she did so towards the most undermanned of the stations. The serving staff let her join without question. She'd been introduced to them (albeit briefly) the day before, and if the new QM was out here in the first place, then she'd been cleared by the kitchen supervisor. Annie took the tongs, fixed her gaze firmly on her work, and began forking bacon onto every plate that was held out for it.
The first two went by without question, and she glimpsed legs in the by-now familiar Joe greens. The third pair of legs clearly belonged to a woman, the fourth to a stockier man in black; they were having a conversation in . . . French? Must be Intel. Five, six, seven, eight—bacon was popular this morning. The next two refused it, and the one after that asked for extra in a thick Chicago accent.
Then the twelfth plate appeared, and things got difficult.
The plate was normal, as far as Annie could tell. She reached into the tray with the tongs and flipped bacon onto the plate with the same motion she'd used God knows how many times in her career. But when the bacon completed its arc, the plate was no longer there, and the forlorn food landed back in the tray with a sad little crunching noise. The plate reappeared a second later, held just over the center of the tray.
Annie blinked, wondering just how tired that monster PT session had made her. "Sorry," she said, and reached into the tray again. This time, she could have sworn she saw it hit the plate, but once again bacon met bacon and somebody laughed.
Some smartass playing keepaway, huh? Annie told herself not to rise to the bait. In her experience, the kind of person who held up other peoples' breakfast would usually get his just desserts, and through no action of hers, either. She retrieved the bacon and, once again, aimed it at the plate. And the plate, once again, slid so neatly out of the way that it might not have been there in the first place.
Her eyes narrowed. "Look, you're holding up the line," she snapped, raising her eyes to the
owner of the offending plate. "Do you want bacon or not?"
Said owner was the slender Asian man she had spotted on PT earlier that morning. He was wearing a light gray tank top and sweat pants, but it was hard to tell under all the grime he was crusted in; from the look of things, he'd gone through at least three mud pits and a tunnel crawl, and topped off his invigorating early-morning workout by playing catch with open paint cans. Annie knew she wouldn't be grinning jauntily if she had a splotch of bright purple paint in her hair, but then, she wouldn't let a dog into the kitchen either.
"Two pieces," he said, holding out the plate again. Annie looked at it, then at him, and then back to it again. Rather than flipping the bacon, she took a firm hold on it with her tongs and placed it carefully on the plate. This time it didn't vanish.
"Tommy, stop teasing the greenie," a voice said. Another plate appeared, this one held by the red-haired woman who'd been chatting with Cinderella earlier. And on her other side was the masked man—and good God, he was loaded for bear, with knives strapped to all available limbs and a full bandolier. Annie was beginning to expect, if not to understand or accept, the casual violations of the regs she'd lived with for years . . . but honestly, that was a little much, wasn't it? Did he expect to have to fight a platoon on his way to the can?
"Then tell the greenie to stop throwing hot food around," Tommy retorted in an injured tone as he moved on to the next station, where the server on Annie's right began carefully scooping scrambled eggs onto his plate. "Someone could get hurt."
Annie ducked her head and endeavored to ignore everybody as she gave bacon to the redhead. It was not to be, however; the masked man had begun signing with his free hand, and that made the redhead snort back an undignified laugh.
"If only," she said. "And by the way," she added as she pulled her plate back. Annie realized with a start that she was being addressed. "don't let Storm Shadow ruffle your feathers. He's a jerk just on principle." Having settled that to her satisfaction, she moved on. Annie was left facing a frightening masked man, draped with enough weaponry to conquer a small nation, who held out his plate and indicated in dumb show that he would like three pieces of bacon, preferably crispy. Or at least, that's what she thought, given that he shook his head every time she proffered a piece that wasn't at least partially charred.
It was hard, Annie reflected, to be afraid of someone whose taste buds were so damaged that he preferred his bacon in carboniferous form. But the way "Tommy" had moved that plate . . .
Ninjas.
Right.