Wrong Alley

A snippet from when Dyne-G217, a teenage Spartan-III gone rogue and hunted by the UNSC, first arrives on Talitsa, just after he stops a pair of carjackers.

Dyne glanced down from one to the other, admiring his handiwork. “Looks like you chose the wrong alley.” He said.

It was then he noticed the hole in the second tough’s pocket. He turned to see where the shot had gone, and figured it out immediately as the twisting motion lanced pain up his side. There was an equally ragged hole in the fabric of his shirt, stained by a liquid darker than the water staining the alley.

He’d never actually been shot before. Shot at, sure, plenty. But nothing had ever actually hit him. As a MJOLNIR-armored Spartan, he’d been just that good. Without his armor, all that superdense muscle wasn’t enough to stop a bullet.

It hurt, more than he expected. Like someone had taken a gravity hammer to his side, not sliced in a little sliver of lead. He didn’t know it was possible for everything to be numb and in pain at the same time, and apparently neither did his brain, because the sensations together registered as burning.

He stumbled over to one wall and leaned his back against it as the sensation took over, but more than pain, what he felt was panic. I can’t fix this on my own, he realized, I need a hospital. And that was bad news.

Hospitals were secured. Security cameras, connected to the civilian grid with facial recognition, and doctors taking blood samples which no way would come back normal. The UNSC would find him, and then. . . he didn’t even want to think about it. But was bleeding out in an alley really a better option?

No, he decided. If he could get the doctors to patch him quickly, maybe he could slip away before anyone had time to find him. So, unsteadily, he started walking.