Saturate✔️

CHAPTER 07: Crash

Awake again.

In pain again.

Greg forced his eyes open and stared up at a cracked hull. Snowflakes drifted across his vision and he could hear a shrieking wind. No, scratch that. He could feel the shrieking wind and holy shit was it cold. Slowly, painfully, he began to check himself over, running his hands carefully across his limbs, his torso, his head. He felt fairly sure that nothing was broken, but he knew he was too cold to really tell. Not a great sign.

How long had he been out?

What had happened-the crash came back to him like a gunshot and he sat up faster than he probably should have. Wincing at the pain, he realized he was on the floor of the transport's hold. He could see Drake leaning over a prone figure.

"Is he okay?" Greg asked, his voice coming out as a croak.

"He's unconscious," Drake replied quietly. "And he hit his head pretty hard. He's bleeding. I'm worried."

"Shit," Greg muttered. "Can't ever catch a fucking break, can we?"

"Well...we made it down at least," Drake replied.

"You seem more optimistic than you used to," Greg said, slowly getting to his feet. Well...his legs weren't broken at least. But fuck did they hurt.

"Trying to be," Drake replied. "Figured that if the situation is shit, then it's gonna be shit regardless of my attitude, so why not try to be positive instead of negative?"

"Is it working?"

"It's...a process."

Greg snorted. "I guess it would be. How long have you been awake?" He started looking around the cabin, trying to hunt down his supplies. Nothing had stayed on him in the crash and now he had to gather his arsenal again.

"Five minutes maybe," he replied. "I checked on you and then once I saw you were breathing and relatively intact, I started tending to Eric."

As he got closer, Greg saw that Drake had an emergency medical kit cracked open on the chilled deck beside Eric. He frowned, his head wound did look pretty bad. Another problem on the list. And the cold was really starting to get to him. Greg quickly finished his search of the hold and found two things. The first was his pistol, free of its holster, which was nowhere to be found. And his shotgun...which had been broken in the crash. He moved into the cockpit and looked all over it, but his SMG was nowhere to be found.

As he straightened up from his search and looked out the front windows, (both of which were cracked badly), he spied something that at least filled him with a bit of hope: the dark angles of a nearby structure.

"Drake, there's a building within sight. We need to get to it," he said.

"Got it," Drake replied.

As Greg returned to the cabin, he saw Drake finishing dressing Eric's head wound. Once it was done, he replaced the medical equipment, snapped the kit closed and reattached it to his belt. He took a deep breath, then picked up Eric and stood.

"Can you handle him?" Greg asked.

Drake nodded tightly. "For now, but we need to move fast."

"Then let's get to it."

They moved to the back of the compartment and Greg hit the access button. The ramp was thankfully in good enough condition to lower. As it did, snow blew even harder into the ship, adding to the small drift of the stuff that had leaked in through the cracks in the hull. The temperature dropped even further. Greg guessed it had to be around zero, probably below that. He fucking hated the cold. With that cheery thought in mind, he hurried down the ramp once it had finished lowering and checked to see how Drake was doing.