Bravo Six: A Call of Duty fan fiction (OLD)

Chapter 10: Heat

"If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting." ~ Curtis LeMay

   "Gal..." said Soap, shaking her shoulder. Price was beside him, looking over her face. Jessica slowly closed her blurry eyes. Her head felt light and achy, and looking around made her nauseated. 

   The Captain sighed. "Looks like she'll be alright for now," he said. He grabbed her shoulder with a firm hand and Jessica's eyes opened again. "You hear me?" he asked her.

   Jessica nodded and straightened up, wincing at the bullet wound in her hip. "I must have passed out..." she mused.

   Gaz, who was sitting behind her to prop her up, scoffed uneasily. "Figured that all out by yourself, did you?" he asked. Though he tried to sound sarcastic and nonchalant, his eyes looked worried and he had his mouth turned down in a frown.

   Her eyes rolled shut. "I held it off for as long as I could, but I guess ten minutes was all I could make it through," she groaned. "How long was I out?"

   "'Bout an hour," answered Soap.

   "Dandy," she muttered. She looked at the wound to see her hips bound with a tan-gray cloth. "What's this?"

   "Al-Asad's shirt," said Gaz.

   Jessica swallowed. "... You used a sweaty dead guy's shirt to wrap up my hip..?" 

   Price was looking at the dead man in the chair as a fly landed on his mutilated forehead. "Not like we have a medic here, Gal. You were still losing blood and going into shock, so it was either that or let you die." He looked at her with a strange expression; in fact, he almost looked ill. "Gaz, put her over there under the loft; she needs to rest. Make sure she stays warm."

   "But I'm...." she started, wanting to insist that she was alright. Her mouth slowly closed when Price's shot a stern look at her. "Please, sir, I'll be fine."

   "We have time before the evac; go lay down," he growled.

   Gaz picked her up and she winced, head hanging toward the floor with a heavy pang of guilt. This put such a burden on her team; had she been more careful, this wouldn't have happened. Jessica turned back to look at Price, then turned away again when her eyes met the Captain's. 

   "E.T.A on the chopper's at least a half hour, Captain Price." said Gaz about six hours later.

   Price shook his head. "No good. We'll all be corpses for ten minutes by then." He turned and looked out the door to the dull gray-blue sky, just starting to be streaked with rose gold sun rays. "Every Ultranationalist psycho is Zakhaev's pocket is about to show up on our door step, coming to claim Al-Asad."

   Gaz gave a side glance to the dead man who was now crawling with blowflies. "Or what's left of him," he said lowly.

   "Right," said Price. He knelt down and started etching faint lines in the dust on the floor. "We'll set charges along the phase line Alpha on the southern hill..." His finger swiped through the map he had drawn to show their path, making a set of arrows along the outside. "And more along phase line Bravo." Another four arrows pointed to a line meant to be a road. "We'll delay them all the way back to the top, and hold our ground at the extraction point in the fields around the farm. Any questions?" he asked, looking up at the other soldiers.

   Gaz slowly smiled, a devilish shadow on his face. "Let's do this." he said.

   Stevens and Cox nodded from where they sat by Jessica, who was turning sickly pale and shivering on occasion. Cox lifted the edge of the shirt around her hip and grimaced, seeing that it was swollen and starting to turn yellow-ish.