Halo: Indelible Past/Chapter Fifteen

"C'mon, Stray! Keep up!"

Simon was running down a dusty, battered street. He could feel the warmth of his arms inside his tattered overcoat--both of them, each as whole and organic as the other. His worn-out shoes pounded against the dusty ground, tormenting his aching soles with each step forward. A bayonet-tipped assault rifle was in his hands.

"Stray, keep up!"

They were ahead of him, all of them. He could see them, a whole crowd of armed children running and stumbling through the rubble. They passed through blown-out buildings and dodged between abandoned cars, an unruly mob scampering in the midst of utter destruction. A few bodies lined the street.

"You're gonna get left behind!"

He saw her now, towards the back of the group. Emily grinned at him through her dirty bangs, her own assault rifle slung over her shoulder. She waved at him, gesturing for him to catch up.

He duly ran faster, leaping over shattered concrete, passing slumped corpses and ruined war machines, his stride growing longer and faster with every painful step. But no matter how fast he ran, Emily and the others just ran faster. He could hear the younger ones laughing, enjoying their little joke. Machine guns clattered off in the distance.

"C'mon Stray!" Emily yelled again.

Someone else, off to the side, screamed: "Incoming!"

An artillery shell's searing whine filled Simon's ears, and then the road just in front of the children erupted in a sea of flames. He opened his mouth to cry out as they vanished in the blinding light, but he was too tired to do anything but gasp for air.

"Simon!"

Emily turned, half of her caught up in the flames. She smiled, waved him onwards once more, and then the hungry fire consumed her.

"Wake up, Simon!"

His left arm was suddenly alive with pain. He dropped the assault rifle and fell to his knees amidst the rubble, grasping desperately at the spasming limb. The pale flesh stretched and tore, replaced by lifeless grey. He screamed as the skeletal prosthetic ripped its way free of the skin...



"Get up, dumbass!"

Simon was jolted awake by Diana's voice and a searing pain in his left shoulder. He shot up and grabbed at his arm, realizing that the couplings keeping his prosthetic attached to his body were being remotely tightened to rip him back into consciousness.

"You bitch," he growled sleepily. "What's your problem?"

"About time you woke up," Diana retorted. "You've been under for the past nine hours."

The pain receded and he looked groggily around Ro'nin's common room. Everything looked just as it had been when he'd drifted off: the boxes with the computer equipment and his armor, the sparse, alien walls, and Zoey, who was a few feet away looking worried.