Halo: Guerrillas In The Mist (No longer being updated)

Chapter 8: A Relaxing Day In

Friday, November 26th

11:00 hours

Dmitri awoke to the pulsing beep of his watches alarm.  He rubbed his eyes as he sat up, before walking over and gently waking the others. They too woke and slowly wrenched themselves onto their feet. After stretching out, they rustled through bags of rations, picking out their favourites. Dmitri pulled out sausage, mash and onion gravy. His absolute favourite.

There was no need to find a particular breakfast meal, there would only be a few in there anyway. That and the fact that most of them tasted like dirty, old boots mixed with dirty water. As he tipped the contents of the bag into a pot, he glanced outside. The weather had calmed down but there was hip deep snow still drifting through the streets on the wind. They wouldn’t be going down for another day anyway, they needed time to recuperate and for their wounds to recover. The biting cold had affect them quite badly.

Petrov was nearly fine, completely at home in the snow and cold. Rumour had it that he had survived in the winter phase of training by simply digging a snow shelter into the side of a hill and catching rabbits with his bare hands. Some even said he had melted ice and smoothed it into a magnifier, using the sun shining through it to light a cooking fire. The others in his team weren’t as lucky.

Lopez and Petrenko both had horrible open sores that had been further widened by the wind and cold. Ramsay and Smith both had the early stages of hypothermia. Luckily, their unit was trained for survival situations, specifically in the winter chill. They had quickly applied makeshift bandages and wrapped themselves up tightly for the night. As soon as they woke up they had pulled a small amount of wood, which they had scavenged earlier, and doused it with some spare fuel from the pelican. They lit a match and dropped it onto the pile of wood, setting it aflame.

As the flames licked up and the wood crackled and charred, Dmitri constructed a tripod from twisted metal and hung the food filled pot from a small spike. It boiled and bubbled until Dmitri saw fit to pull it off and scrape it into a mess tin. He dug into the sausage ferociously, tearing with his hands. He was ravenous with hunger, the calories depleted from his body after all the fighting. Things had been pretty wild for what seemed like a normal deployment against a covenant force.

Arcadia was a living hell, and almost as bad to remember but Dmitri had the feeling that this would be worse. They had already seen his company cut to ribbons by plasma and needles, then burnt to a crisp by a Scarab. Now they were trapped in this deserted city, with only a slim chance of getting out, surviving by the skin of their teeth. The only thing that consoled him was that it was unlikely it could get much worse. He hoped he wouldn’t regret thinking that.

As he washed out his mess tin with melted snow, he heard a rumbling. His heart sank at the thought of another engagement. They all rushed to the gaping wound in the buildings side and Dmitri shouldered his S2 AM sniper. Peering through the scope, he saw a V formation of banshees, nine in total, sailing through the air. Below them was a small scouting unit of Ghosts, with a couple of troop carriers in the mix. Two banshees peeled off and landed on a rooftop, a couple of blocks away from the building they had narrowly escaped from earlier. The height of their current building gave them a brilliant, commanding view of the entire cityscape.

While the rest retreated to their main base, two pairs of Ghosts and Shadows stayed behind at the base of the building. Dmitri could just about make out the troops scampering into the doorway, ducking to avoid being seen. Their earlier attack had done its job, making them scared of a larger marine force. They gathered on the roof and set up a sniper nest.

Dmitri and the squad waited for half an hour, until all the Covenant were assembled on the roof. They had split between two rooms, two elites, two jackals and four grunts in each room. Usain, the squads backup sharpshooter, picked up the second sniper and took his place beside Dmitri. Taking a room each, they set about eradicating the buildings infestation.

Usain scoped in quickly and noticed an opportunity. A Banshee was balanced precariously on the edge of the roof. If he hit it in the right spot, the explosion would take out most of them and the fragmentation would deal with the rest. He took aim at the Banshees fuel intake and prepared to swing his barrel over to engage the furthest away elite. He let loose two rounds.

The Banshee tore and ripped under the pressure from the plasma fuel cell rupturing. The fragments flew in an arc and impaled all of the aliens, tearing through them and grabbing at them like giant fishhooks. The second shot tore a hole straight through the surviving elite, dropping onto his knees before collapsing in a heap.

Meanwhile, Dmitri had lined up some shots of his own. The elites were next to each other, perfect to hit with one bullet. This room also happened to hold the nest’s ammo dump. This day is turning in my favour, Dmitri laughed to himself. His reticule changed as he adjusted his scope’s distance and wind settings. He knew he’d need to lead the targets and compensate with a few millimeters in bullet drop. At the same time as Usain, he let rip his rounds.

The first ripped into the elite’s temple before dropping into the next one’s neck. They both crumpled into each other as their thick, purple blood spilled out onto the crisp blanket of snow. As the second bullet struck the plasma ammo, two jackals made a desperate, if futile, attempt to escape. The plasma flung them off the building and they flailed their arms as they dropped into the cold street below. The other grunts had their heads smashed to pieces under the immense force of the blast.

Another good job done, Dmitri and the squad retired back for some more rest. They would spend the rest of this day recuperating before setting off on their mission to harass the enemy the next day. Dmitri walked into the corner furthest corner away from the hole and buttoned up his trench coat. He sat, closed his eyes and relaxed into a state of quiet, thoughtful contemplation. The rest of the men either did the same or pulled out some form of entertainment from their packs. Whatever they did, they made sure it didn’t involve too much energy wasting. They would need every ounce of strength in their bodies to endure the next day.