Snow

Alice, who was on point, signed that he was going to advance and did so.
You don’t move fast on sloping, frozen, hard-packed snow.  Nor can you crouch very low wearing six layers of clothing including padded thermals with eighty pounds of gear on your back and a loaded, cocked automatic rifle in your hands but Alice did a very creditable job and went to ground again behind an outcrop of rock about eighty metres short of the ridge.  For all his care, though, and despite his snow-coloured helmet, cape and overtrousers he’d still looked like a fly on a wedding-cake as he traversed the slope.
I scanned the rocks of the ridge with my ‘scope.  The sky behind it was a frozen, washed-out blue and the black rocks were jagged and shattered like the dirty teeth of a bloke who’s just taken a rifle-barrel across the mouth. The wind was doing about a hundred miles an hour from the other side and bringing streamers of fine snow which were arcing like fire-hoses over our heads and falling in a light, fine, shining powder around us.   The chance there were fuzzies up there seemed slim to zero but the War against Terror was still making grunts like us go where no grunt had gone before, although not particularly boldly as our main concern was getting back again.
Alice raised his head and peeped cautiously over his rock.
“Shit. I don’t fucking believe this,” his voice said through the piece of plastic in my ear.
Most troopers swear like troopers until they get three stripes and a glimpse of officer-land, when they clean their act up.  Alice was not officer material.
“Report,” I snapped into the mike under my ice-stiff scarf.
His reply was a further stream of stunned-sounding obscenities and I could see him shaking his head in disbelief.  Whatever it was, though, he wasn’t behaving as though it was going to shoot at him so I signed Tugger to stay back and cut across the slope to another outcrop ten metres to Alice’s left.  He was still staring at something ahead of him like a kid at his first Christmas tree, so I peered around my own rock to see what it was.
“Fuckin’ hell,” I breathed into the mike for the world to hear as long as it had satellites, AWACS and some fancy real-time encryption algorithms, and was listening.
The slope formed a shallow bowl just in front of us before climbing again to the ridge.  In the bowl was a girl.  A naked girl, in temperatures of minus 10c. and a wind-chill of as much again.  An absolutely stunningly beautiful, naked girl posing motionless with her eyes shut and one foot raised behind her to rest in a loop of her arm like some weird yoga practice.
“This ain’t fuckin’ real,” Alice breathed electronically into my ear.
She had a kind of serene, Mona Lisa smile on her face, and was very much alive.  Round, full, prick-throbbing breasts rose and fell gently, regularly, as she breathed, one pulled slightly out of shape by an arm raised and folded behind her head.  Wind that would have frozen my eyeballs were it not for my goggles played gently with thick tresses of golden hair while skin that should have been bleached white with bits dropping off after ten minutes in that cold looked as pink and smooth and warm as the last tart I’d had in Hereford before the tour.
“Who the fuck is she?” Alice asked.
‘How the fuck should I know?’ I didn’t say.  Even with her clothes on she would be a stunner, but the kind of stunner with a name like Sally you’d find behind a bar pretty much anywhere.  With her clothes off in the snow fourteen thousand fucking feet up a fucking mountain in the fucking Hindu Kush twenty miles from the nearest fucking path and a hundred from the nearest fucking fire…..  “Jesus fucking Christ!” I breathed.
“Nah,” said Alice.  "Don't reckon on that." Quite a wit, our Alice.
I couldn’t see her clothes nearby.  Nor any footprints around her.  Out of the main force of the wind the fine snow had been able to settle around her almost to her thighs, so she’d been there a while.  With one leg tucked forward and one stretched behind her in that yoga position her crotch was buried in the snow but I could imagine the golden fur between her thighs and the snow packed into the slit of her body, the wrinkled bud of her clit tingling with its cold embrace,  the small, moist, fragrant cave in the snow just beneath the lush lips between her legs made by the heat of her cunt radiating desire.
I shook the thoughts from my head.  Was she some religious nut?  Was she just spaced out?  Was I spaced out?  High altitude could do funny things to a bloke, but Alice had seen it too. 
I signed him to cover me and slipped around my rock to crawl towards the girl.  Something moved among the rocks behind her and snow puffed into white roses around me.  The girl, in the way, took a round in the back and bright red blood bloomed between her lovely breasts to paint the snow between us scarlet.  Her eyes opened, startled. She gazed at me puzzled for a moment and then folded gracefully forward over her knee.  Alice’s rifle barked and the firing stopped.
“Got the fucker,” Alice said with satisfaction.
The fuzzy was alone and we gathered around the dead girl in the red snow, folded like a ballerina doing the dying swan naked with a little round hole between her shoulders.  I had seen in her eyes she had thought she was finally alone, in her mountaintop world, finding whatever she was looking for, when our world had intruded.
“Fuckin’ shame,”  Alice observed.  "Nice tits."

© Rex Antioch
Written for ASSTR’s 2003 anniversary celebration and, personally, to celebrate the awesome talent of Jonathon Earl Bowser. One of the objectives of the celebration is to acknowledge those who make a donation to ASSTR. ASSTR relies on your donations to keep doing its great work. Please make a donation if you can. You can find details on how to donate at http://www.asstr.org/donations.html . 
“Snow” can be found at  http://www.jonathonart.com/drawing1.html