The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 31: Distress

"Give me a bearing," Greg said as he drove down the mountain at a nearly reckless speed.

"Hold on," Izzy replied. They'd had to switch to the radio given how loud the engine was roaring now. They had attempted to get in touch with the Marines who had sent out the distress call, but had only made tenuous contact before the link was terminated. Which could mean just about anything, given how wildly unstable Wintermute was. Izzy was hunched over the dashboard, using the Warthog's basic navigation system to try and get a rough of idea of where the communication had originally come from.

All they'd managed to determine so far was an extremely rough direction: down the mountain, opposite the direction HQ was in.

Izzy looked up from the dashboard. They were heading down a decently steep incline, what could hardly be called a road, in between rises of icy rock to either side. Greg was navigating it as best he could. It suddenly turned left. He spun the wheel, leaning on the breaks to keep from flipping the Carrier, and the rock wall to the right fell away abruptly, giving them a fantastic, immense view of the region beyond.

"Stop!" Izzy snapped.

He skidded the Warthog to a halt, ice and rock and dirt shooting up. "What?"

Izzy stood and so did he once he'd thrown it into park. She pointed. "There."

He looked past her. The road they were on continued winding down for another mile or so and eventually let out onto a simple road that went off into the distance, between huge frozen fields and vast collections snow-capped trees. One such forest, ahead and to the right, about two miles distant, was what she was indicating.

Greg focused. He could just make out the distant sparks of gunfire a good ways into the forest, in a clearing.

"That's our target," he said, dropping back into his seat and, once Izzy was down as well, throwing the vehicle into drive and speeding off. "Keep trying to get in touch with them."

"On it," Izzy replied.

He listened to her litany over the radio as he sped down the road, trusting the Warthog to handle the terrain. Nothing on the radio. Greg tried to tell himself that it didn't matter, not right now. Someone was still fighting.

Unless it was the Flood shooting those guns.

He quashed that thought, hit the bottom of the incline, turned onto the road that would take them towards where they needed to go, and pushed the pedal to the metal. Pushing the Warthog as fast as it would go, he drove down the derelict road until they reached the forest where the survivors were, hopefully, still fighting for their lives. There didn't seem to be any way in, but he could at least go off-road and drive along the lower edge of the forest until he was roughly parallel with where he had seen the fighting.

Based off his memory, the clearing had been about a hundred meters into the forest, and maybe three hundred away from the road.

Of course, that was an extremely rough estimate.

"I'm not getting shit!" Izzy snapped as he whipped the Warthog off the road and began driving along the desolate treeline.

"We'll get there," he replied, forced to slow down thanks to the bumpy landscape.

They drove across the open area, hopping a few snow dunes and grunting each time the Warthog landed after gaining some air.

Finally, he was about as close as they were going to get in a vehicle.

Skidding to a halt, he put it back into park and stood up in his seat. Looking through the trees, he saw several uncertain figures lumbering around, away from him, towards the sound of gunfire. They were still fighting, they had to be, and he'd been about correct. Greg grabbed his battle rifle and hopped off, landing with a grunt in the snow and hitting the ground running. As he slipped into the trees, Izzy quickly caught up with him.