The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 03: Alone

He'd been walking for probably half an hour now.

At first, he had allowed all the cold, empty silence to wash over him, letting his mind finish settling completely before he started poking and prodding at his situation. He studied the snow, the trees, the sky, that thin pall of smoke that rose into the air. As the last vestiges of the crash and the night before fell away from him, or fell away inasmuch as they were going to, (he still ached all over in a number of ways), Greg settled into thinking about how he was going to do this. Or, first, what he needed to do. He made a list.

He needed supplies.

Food, clean water, medicine. God, a medkit would go a long way right now. Even half of one would help a lot. He had wounds that needed to be cleaned and bandaged, and painkillers would help a hell of a lot. And some water purification tablets, too. Then there were weapons. He had no idea what kind of hostiles he might be facing on this barren wasteland of a planet. Obviously, they had run into some kind of problem.

Unless the distress call had been a false positive, a mistake.

But even then, although he was fuzzy on the details of last night, he did remember Sergeant Brink bringing up the fact that there was hostile native wildlife on Wintermute. So he had that to contend with. He didn't even have a combat knife or a single bullet to his name. Some survival gear would be great, too. A compass, a map, several other useful trinkets that could help a man stuck in a snowbound location.

Most of all though, he was kind of hoping for survivors.

Having even another person around would help a lot. He'd spent times in total isolation before, not dissimilar to this in some instances. Where his transport would get shot down and he was the only survivor, or he had to go off by himself because there were multiple things that needed doing and not enough people to do them. Being alone just sucked. Although, on the other hand, he felt a strange sense of...serenity was too strong a word, but there was a kind of elation to him right now. It seemed to bolster him as he walked into the forest.

Greg supposed it was because he had a rather linear mind.

He enjoyed have straightforward tasks put in front of him, and this was pretty straightforward. When he had something as simple as: walk to a crash site, put in front of him, (he thought it was the crash site), it became much easier to let all the extraneous stuff fall away. All the fears and worries and anxieties that naturally came after something as traumatic as falling out the back of a Pelican and being stranded, alone, and weaponless on an alien world began to drift away.

So, he'd get to the crash site and gather up whatever information and supplies he could find there. He had no idea where he was and he couldn't be sure, but Greg thought that they had fallen far short of their goal. There was supposed to be another half an hour or so in the flight to Wintermute's UNSC Command. So getting there was probably out of the question right now, but that was too far into the future anyway.

He needed to determine if anyone was still alive from his squad, or the second squad.

Besides his own personal safety and survival, that was probably his biggest goal at the moment. He'd gotten to know some of them kind of well over the past several months. It would be nice to know if they'd been killed or not.

It didn't take all that much longer to track the smoke to its origin.

"Crap," he whispered.

It was pretty ugly.

Greg stepped into the clearing that the Pelican had ultimately ended up in. Its nose was buried in a cluster of bent trees. The smoke was still bleeding slowly from one of the engines. He approached the rear of the dropship, unhappily studying what he found. There were corpses, frozen over. Three of them were still strapped into their chairs. He began identifying the dead. Sergeant Brink was there. And the other Corporal on the team, Bulder. They were both strapped into their chairs. And there was Miller, the poor kid was maybe six months out of boot. And Richards. And Harris, and Flint too. Half the squad were corpses right here.