Life On Helghan.
OK then chapter 15, sorry I took so long, I did intend to write last week but I was under a lot of stress so I decided to hold off till I felt better, and I do now so here it is.
Chapter 15.
We landed in the middle of a heavy blizzard and visibility was too bad for us to do anything except find shelter and wait the storm out, luckily we'd landed near an old demolished outpost in the middle of the otherwise deserted area, I sent the men in to sweep the buldings and report back to me, they came back and told me it was clear but there were crashed Intruders down there which was odd. I thanked him and called to the rest of the unit.
"OK boys you're all with me, see the building near the centre? It looks big enough for us all to shelter inside, follow me."
I stepped down from the small hill I was on and moved toward the centre of the complex, there were a few things wrong, I noticed the area had been covered in some sort of shrapnel and began wondering which side had been the target but I didn't have to wonder for long, while walking I almost tripped over something that had been buried by the snow, it was soft so I dug it up, it was the corpse of a Helghast officer who seemed to have been dead for awhile going by how frozen he was, I crouched by him and checked his body and noticed someone had been through his pockets but there were no other signs of disturbance I could see, the injuries to his chest were pretty extreme and it was obvious he hadn't been shot, now I'd figured out why there were signs of shrapnel everywhere, I motioned to one of the men to come to me.
"Sir?"
"Is there anything known about what happened here?"
"Well sir, I don't know the details of how this happened but I do know that Chairman Stahl sent these men here to ambush a group of ISA marines who had been causing him a lot of problems, seems they won, that's all I know sir."
"Thank you corporal."
I stood up and continued to the building, I started getting paranoid about this unit thinking it could be the remainder of Alpha Squad but couldn't know for certain, at the entrance to the building I noticed a hand-print in blood on the wall and went inside, the bottom floor was just one big room with five large pillars on both sides, I was heading for the stairs when I noticed another body lying by a wall with a message scrawled on it in blood.
It read 'That bastard just left me to die the ISA are a truly evil enemy if anyone finds me here please tell my family that joining this fucking army was the last mistake I made in my life.'
His body also had extensive chest injuries and it amazed me that he'd survived long enough to write this, there was a pool of frozen blood by on of the pillars with a trail leading to a small pool in the middle of the floor and then the pool around his corpse which suggested he'd moved away from the pillar for some reason and collapsed then dragged himself to the wall after this 'bastard' had left. I saw his face because he'd removed his helmet, his hair was short and black and he looked young very young, no older than seventeen in fact, which got me a bit but there was nothing I could do, I left his frozen corpse with mixed feelings of anger and sadness and went upstairs to check the rest of the building, there was nothing to speak of, so now all we could do was wait out the storm.
End of chapter 15.
If you've read Deep Cold you've figured it out by now lol, don't worry I spoke to Stuch awhile back and he gave me permission to use his characters if I could find a way to write them in, the reason for this chapter was because I wanted to set the stage for later ones instead of just jumping straight into them finding the base and attacking and also use it as an excuse to explore what the young Helghast might have done after Vanderburg left him there, I came up with quite a few things but in the end I settled on the message because it just felt right to me so I'm sorry if you don't like it.