Chapter 1: Welcome to The Bad Place

Chapter 1: Welcome to The Bad Place

The silence was the worst part.

Sergeant First Class Kade Sullivan was a man conditioned by noise. The rhythmic whump-whump-whump of helicopter blades slicing through thick, humid air. The percussive cough of a mortar tube sending a round downrange. The crackle of a radio, spitting out life-or-death coordinates. Even the raucous, profane symphony of a barracks full of young paratroopers was a kind of music.

Here, the only sound was the asthmatic hum of an ancient HVAC unit and the whisper-quiet click of his mouse. It was the sound of a soul oxidizing.

His new home, his new battlefield, was a beige cubicle in the G4 section of a three-star command, a place so far removed from the "real Army" it might as well have been on the moon. The crisp OCP uniform he wore felt like a costume. The rigid posture he’d perfected over fourteen deployments to places that smelled of cordite, fear, and sun-baked earth was now just a way to keep his spine from fusing to the cheap office chair.

His eyes, sharp and accustomed to scanning for threats across hundreds of meters, now scanned endless lines of text on a flickering monitor. Unit Identification Codes, National Stock Numbers, request statuses. It was a foreign language, and his Rosetta Stone was a stack of regulations thick enough to stop a bullet, left behind by the last poor bastard who’d sat in this chair. Rumor was, he’d just stopped showing up one day. Kade was beginning to understand why.

Three months. It had been three months since the orders had dropped, yanking him from his Platoon Sergeant billet in the 82nd Airborne Division. One minute he was training jumpers for a rapid deployment, the next he was being told his “unique skill set” was needed elsewhere. He’d since concluded that “unique skill set” was Army-speak for “he has a pulse and we have an empty seat.”

His nickname, ‘Sloppy,’ was a piece of cruel irony he’d earned in Ranger School. His knots were perfect, his gear immaculate, his shooting groups impossibly tight. His instructors, unable to find a legitimate flaw, had christened him ‘Sloppy Sullivan’ out of sheer frustration. The name stuck, a badge of honor among those who knew. Here, he felt like he was finally earning it. His mind felt sloppy. His purpose, nonexistent.

A shadow fell over his desk, smelling faintly of stale coffee and cheap deodorant.

“Sullivan.”

The voice was soft and wheezing, devoid of authority but dripping with a sense of self-importance. Kade turned his chair slowly, schooling his features into a neutral mask.

There stood Mike. His new boss. His warden.

Mike was a Department of the Army Civilian in his late fifties, a man who had clearly lost his own war with gravity. A cheap, sweat-stained polo shirt stretched precariously over a paunch that spoke of a life spent in swivel chairs. His balding head gleamed under the fluorescent lights, and his weak, shifty eyes avoided direct contact, instead seeming to focus on a spot somewhere on Kade’s collar.

“Mornin’, Mike,” Kade said, his voice flat.

“It’s Mr. Henderson,” Mike corrected, his lips thinning into a sour line. He gestured a doughy hand at the screen. “Are you making any headway with the backlog from the 10th Mountain? I got an email from their brigade S4. They’re getting antsy.”

Kade took a slow breath, counting to three in his head. He had been assigned the property books for three separate divisions, a workload meant for a team of three, not a single NCO with zero formal training in logistics. The backlog wasn't just from the 10th Mountain; it was a digital Mount Everest of requests, transfers, and turn-ins from across the entire Army.

“I’m prioritizing the urgent operational needs first,” Kade explained, keeping his tone even. “The ones for units currently deployed or preparing to deploy. The 10th Mountain requests are for routine supply resets. They’re in the queue.”

Mike leaned in, and Kade fought the urge to recoil from the smell of his breath. “Sergeant, I don’t think you understand. A Lieutenant Colonel emailed me. Which means I now have to email him. Which means I have to do work. Your job is to make sure I don’t have to do work. See how that works?”

The condescension was a physical force. Kade’s jaw tightened. In his old unit, a leader who spoke to an NCO like that would find himself having a very direct, very unpleasant conversation about respect. Here, Mike was the chain of command. It was absurd.

“I see,” Kade said. “I’ll move the 10th Mountain requests up the list.”

“Good. See that you do.” Mike seemed satisfied, having asserted his petty dominance for the morning. He glanced at the awards and decorations listed on Kade’s personnel file, which he had insisted be printed and placed in a binder on the desk. “All that Airborne and Ranger stuff… it’s impressive, I guess. But it doesn’t help you with a spreadsheet, does it? This is the real world, Sergeant. It’s not about jumping out of planes; it’s about managing expectations.”

The rage that flashed through Kade was a white-hot poker. He thought of the men he’d led, the friends he’d lost, the sheer terror and exhilaration of a night jump into hostile territory. To have it all dismissed as ‘stuff’ by a man whose greatest physical challenge was walking from his car to his desk was an insult of the highest order.

But he just nodded. “No, sir. It doesn’t.”

Mike gave a self-satisfied grunt and waddled back to his own office, the only one in the section with a door. Kade watched him go, his eyes narrowed. He was beginning to analyze Mike the same way he would an enemy position: identifying weaknesses, patterns, and probable courses of action. The primary weakness was obvious: Mike was an incompetent fraud. The threat was that this fraud had complete authority over Kade’s career.

Kade turned back to his screen, the anger slowly cooling into a hard, dense ball of resolve in his gut. He was trapped. A warrior in a clerk’s world, a wolf commanded by a sheep. Every day spent here was another day his skills, his spirit, atrophied. His long-term goal—to get to Special Forces Assessment and Selection—seemed to drift further away with every keystroke.

He pulled up the 10th Mountain files. The requests were a mess. Duplicate orders, incorrect stock numbers, requests for equipment they already had. It was a perfect snapshot of the bureaucratic ineptitude that permeated this place. Cleaning it up would take hours, hours he should be spending on a critical request from a unit in Afghanistan that actually needed armor plating for their trucks.

But Mike had given him an order.

He began to type, his fingers flying across the keyboard with a bitter precision. The job was impossible, his boss was a moron, and he was alone. There was no backup, no support, no one to call. He was a one-man army, fighting a war of attrition against paperwork.

He worked through lunch, the only fuel a burnt, sludgy coffee from the communal pot. The phone rang intermittently, faceless voices from other bases, each with their own urgent, impossible demand. He handled them all with a detached, cynical efficiency, his vast network of old contacts from his previous life proving more useful than any regulation. He could get things done, not because of the system, but in spite of it.

Late in the afternoon, as the office lights cast long shadows across the drab carpet, Kade leaned back, rubbing his burning eyes. He had cleared the 10th Mountain’s requests. He had located the armor plating for the unit in Afghanistan. He had solved a dozen other logistical crises.

He had won the day’s battle. But the war stretched out before him, an endless expanse of beige cubicles and incompetent bosses.

This wasn’t just a bad assignment. It was a prison. And as he stared at the mountain of paperwork that had barely shrunk, a cold, hard thought began to form.

Every prison has a weak point. And every warden has a breaking point.

Kade Sullivan cracked his knuckles, a grim, knowing smirk touching his lips for the first time all day. His mission had just changed. It was no longer about getting back to the real Army. It was about surviving this one. And if he was lucky, burning it all down on his way out.