The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 04: Desperation

As he marched through the forest, freshly fallen snow crunching underfoot, Greg began running through a list of who might still be alive. Those who were not counted among the dead at the crash site. Besides him, the highest ranking member would now be Lance Corporal Serrano. He hoped she was alive. Based on their time serving together, he had come to know her as a Marine of confidence, competence, and calm. Well, most of the time. She seemed like she got pissed a little too easily off the battlefield, but he supposed there was a lot to get pissed off about nowadays. If anyone could walk out of this now, it would be her.

Then the other Lance, Masterson. He didn't know much about the man, other than that he was a quiet medic who performed admirably under fire. He kept to himself and always seemed to have a quiet precision to whatever he was doing. PFC Tordsson was kind of the opposite. The blonde rifleman was loud and always getting shouted at for his sloppy personal space. He never seemed capable of making his bed to the CO's satisfaction. He drank whenever the occasion arose, but Greg had never actually seen the man drunk.

Or maybe it was just that his sober persona was so similar to his drunk persona that he just couldn't tell the difference. Greg smiled when he thought of Tord. He was absolutely the kind of Marine you wanted at your side and at your back in a firefight. He never seemed afraid, but he wasn't stupidly reckless either. He'd fight his ass off and take a bullet for you if he had to. And then there was Private Wallace.

No one really liked Wallace, or what everyone had taken to calling him, probably because it pissed him off so much, Wally. He was a rich dick, had a rich and powerful daddy, and liked to think that being born into a family of wealth made him objectively superior to everyone who wasn't. He always had to brag, always had to boast, and was a terrible Marine. The only thing impressive about him was that these tendencies hadn't gotten stomped out of him during boot. That took a special kind of stupid to retain those qualities.

Greg had no doubt that if humanity wasn't so desperate and strapped for soldiers, he would've been tossed out awhile ago. Probably would've washed out of training, actually. He was argumentative, questioned orders, wasn't even that great of a shot. And finally there'd be Private Bell. He was the latest addition to the squad and just a sorry kid shoved through the system so that they could throw his ass into the galactic meat grinder as fast as possible. And it showed. He was brave, though, Greg had to give him that.

They'd shared two battles together, and he hadn't broken, hadn't fled, hadn't hid. He'd done his duty and managed to come out the other side alive and relatively intact both times. Greg saw some of himself in the kid, and figured that if he stayed alive long enough, Bell would probably manage to make a great Marine.

As Greg shifted around a tree, he caught sight of something up ahead and hesitated. Frowning, he moved a little closer, focusing on it. It looked like...a body, leaning against a tree. In standard UNSC armor. Well, crap. He picked back up the pace, closing the distance between them. There was a lot of blood on the tree, and if he looked under the snow around the corpse, he imagined he'd find even more. Reaching out, Greg gently brushed the snow from the body's face, and quickly realized who it was he was looking at.

Wally.

He had a grimace of pain etched into his frozen face that hurt to look at. An expression of pain and terror. His hands were clutched over his stomach. Greg frowned. There was a small part of him that wanted to make a joke, even in his own head, something about how all of Wally's influence and wealth and so-called power couldn't save him in the end, but another part of him quashed that immediately. He didn't wish the guy dead, especially not like this. This was just an ugly way to go. Good God. Reluctantly, Greg began searching his pockets.

As his hands pried open pockets, he tried to think about what could've happened. They would have left as a group from the Pelican, and maybe they had gone this way. They could have left Wally behind, he supposed, but he found that hard to believe. Maybe his injuries were too serious and he'd died on the way there? Except...