"Needle and a thread, gotta get you outta my head, needle and a thread, gonna wind up dead."
Fatigue and long hours, that was what a UNSC vehicle operator's job entailed most of the time. Although their official job description was to operate light vehicles and move personnel around the battlefield, more often than not there was less driving than there was sitting and waiting in long lines, watching as EOD teams cleared roadside bombs and tanks shelled fortifications.
Today was no different than any other for Daniel. His eyes were bloodshot, straining to stay focussed on the road as he sat in the pitch dark of night, the blackout lights in his warthog APC casting a dim, red glow over his dashboard.
His mind was dangerously occupied with thoughts Emily. He couldn't keep the glow of her smile out of his head, and it was distracting him. He didn't need to be preoccupied thinking about her if a rocket came streaking towards the convoy and he needed to hit the gas and get out of there in a hurry, or if the locals that were currently blocking the convoy began to turn on the dismounted soldiers in front of the convoy that were trying to clear them off the road.
The locals weren't happy about the URF being there, but they also weren't happy about the UNSC driving a column of armored vehicles down the middle of their highway.
Sometimes he wondered which side they were on. They seemed to support the UNSC when asked about it, but when push came to shove and they needed to clear out URF positions they always seemed to come out of the woodwork to stop them.
He took a deep breath and pushed the locals and Emily from his mind, fixing his eyes back on the road ahead of him as he tried to stay focused while his APC sat parked.
Ten minutes later a group of MPs showed up with less than lethal ammo and threatened to open fire if they didn't clear the road. It wasn't an endearing tactic, but the longer they sat parked in the middle of the road the more likely it was they would be hit by an ambush.
Just when he thought the convoy was beginning to move again, the lead squad's point man stopped and began to survey the area after their explosives detector picked up something.
Daniel's radio kept him awake even though his mind was now quiet. Chatter bounced back and forth between the squad about what to do, but he knew ultimately the decision would be left up to him.
"It'll take a while to do a search. What do you think Sarge?" Asked one of the soldiers, inquiring as to wether they should scan for the bomb.
Some part of Daniel just wanted to say fuck it and drive right on through. He was too damn tired to stay out in the field much longer, but he heard Emily's voice echo like a hollow ring in his head reminding him to stay safe, and he remembered the fear he had seen in her eyes when she had thought of an IED, and what it could do to a person.
He was exhausted, but so was everyone else here, and he wasn't about to risk their lives because of his own impatience.
"Better safe than sorry," he replied.
The soldier, now standing in his headlights, gave a thumbs up and got to the side of the road, positioning her squad near the edge of a water filled embankment so they could cover the road while the EOD team worked. The occupants of Daniel's vehicle, minus himself, exited as well, taking up similar positions to help.
Daniel threw the APC in reverse and made way for the column's mammoth elephant heavy recovery vehicle to pass him. The elephant belonged to a Navy EOD team, and contained a single, large suit of power armor used for defusing bombs.
The elephant pulled off the road and began unloading the suit with a heavy crane. It was a behemoth monstrosity designed to contain a single soldier, somewhat like spartan armor, but at least three times as big and four times more armored. Massive hydraulic rams and servos protruded from every joint, and on the chest plate was painted 'if you see me running try to keep up.'
When the suit was unloaded and the operator had taken control, he began to slowly lumber towards the site of the suspected bomb, using a scanner to look for objects under the road.
He didn't get very far before he froze in place.
"Found something," the operator said over the radio, "looks like a device of some kind. Checking it out."
Daniel fought to keep awake as the operator locked out the suit's legs and bent over at the waist, using the suit's robotic arms to begin to dig up the bomb. Daniel couldn't see clearly what he was getting at, but by the way he was digging he knew he had found something.
"Hold on," said the operator after a minute, lifting something out of the hole.
The operator cleared away some more dirt and revealed a brick of plastic explosive, then pulled a thick electrical line out of the ground which ran to several other spots on the road, no doubt to other mines, more than a few of which were directly underneath Daniel's APC.
"Shit!" Cursed the operator, "the whole place is mined. Everyone off the road."
Daniel's mind slowed down, and his vision blurred as he heard the operator's command.
He kicked the APC into gear in what seemed like slow motion, and slammed his foot onto the gas pedal, but he wasn't nearly fast enough.
The first of the mines detonated under the EOD suit in front of him. Although the suit was supposed to protect its operator from blasts, it wasn't design to take a direct hit like that. He was thrown onto his back, his suit bleeding hydraulic fluid into the air and all over the road.
The second blast shredded the suit and its operator.
The third mine detonated in the middle of the dismounted soldiers, throwing some of them off their feet and into the water on either side of the road and turning others into a cloud of mist and dust with a loud bang and an explosion of dust and shrapnel.
Then, in a flash of dirt and fire, another explosion ripped the ground open under his APC, sending it flying into the air.
His stomach shot into his throat, his helmeted head slammed into the ceiling of the vehicle, and his ears popped from the pressure and the noise.
For a moment he felt weightless, his ears ringing as the vehicle floated in the air, and then his vision exploded into color as it impacted the ground, sending his head swimming and throwing him into vertigo.
His ears were ringing and his head was pounding. For a moment, he wondered if he was alive or dead.
He sat there for a moment, in pain and completely unable to move as he sat strapped into the driver's seat of his overturned warthog.
He was vaguely aware that the APC must have landed in the water, as the cabin was slowly but surely began filling with water, but he honestly felt no urge to fight to escape.
The pain as too great, his head was pounding too hard. He touched his hand to his chest and felt blood. Surely he wold bleed out long before he drown.
Death.
The thought of it frightened him for sure. The thought of not being able to continue on was awful, but only lasted for a moment before it overwhelmed him with regret.
His men were out there fighting, and dying at the hands of innies. He couldn't give up and abandon them here. So many of them had died. He wouldn't let harm come to another one of them.
Then, like cold water, Emily bled into his mind once again.
As much as he didn't want to fight and didn't want to aggravate his physical pain any further, the pain that came from the regret he felt was greater than any wound he could have suffered. It was the regret of never telling Emily he loved her. He had felt this way about her for so long, now he would never get the chance to tell her that he had, and his last thoughts would be of what could have been had he told her.
No.
He was not going to die this way. He was not going to have these be his last thoughts.
He knew that he loved her, and he had to know if she felt the same way, and if he was going to let this day cause him to regret losing her and his men, he would be damned.
Before he could think about her, however, he needed to get his men out of here. Duty before all, that was what he had signed on for. Anything else was secondary to getting himself and his men out alive.
He used all the will he had left to move his arms and reach for his combat knife to cut himself out of his harness. As his head cleared he began to notice the dull thuds of gun fire and the sound of rushing water as the ringing in his ears began to subside, spurring him on to move quicker.
He pulled his combat knife from its sheath on his leg, causing a lance of pain to shoot through him.
He cried out and bit down hard on his helmet's chin strap, ignoring the pain and cutting himself from his harness, causing himself to fall onto the driver's side window of the hog.
A large splinter of glass from the broken window jabbed through his leg, and freezing cold water flooded the wound and soaked his uniform, weighing him down.
He tore off his helmet and hit the quick release latch on his armor, letting it fall from him as he grabbed onto anything he could to try and stand up, the water now filling over half the hog's cabin.
He forced himself to stand, in spite of the pain. He was not going to die here.
He was going to see Emily again or die trying.
He forced the passenger side door open and hoisted himself out.
His arms, his legs, his chest, and his head all screamed in pain. His lungs were on fire and it felt like someone was pounding on the inside of his skull with a hammer, but he still gathered the strength to push himself from the hog.
He fell out of the door of the hog and into the water, clawing at its surface until his fingers felt the dusty sand of the shore.
What had previously been a dull thud of gunfire now permeated the air around him. The sound of infantry firing their assault rifles and armored vehicles sending high velocity shells across the road at an enemy he couldn't see was absolutely deafening. Clearly this had been a carefully planned ambush, and whoever was shooting at them now had come to finish them off.
He managed to pull himself half way onto the beach before he could no longer continue, his vision blurry from the pain and his hands shaking from adrenaline, which was all he had left to go on.
He heard a sharp scream of pain come from his left, and he looked over to see one of his men laying on the side of the embankment. It was one of the newer members of his unit, Private Hackett. He was screaming wildly and thrashing as he pressed the side of a heated combat knife to the stubs of his lower legs, which he had lost in the IED blast, and cauterized the flesh to stop the bleeding.
Daniel forced himself to claw his way over to him, and when the man had finished cauterizing his legs he had reached him.
Hackett threw his head back in pain and screamed one last time in agony before Daniel Daniel reached up and pulled off his helmet, looking him in the eyes with a pained expression.
"Hackett," yelled Daniel over the gunfire.
Hackett looked at him with glazed eyes and grunted, grinding his teeth together.
"Dammit sarge," he cursed loudly, his eyes shut tight in pain, "I'm fine. Get out of here."
He seemed liked he was ready to continue, but another wave of pain hit him and he screamed out loud, tears streaming form his eyes from the sheer pain.
"No," yelled Daniel, more to himself than to Hackett.
No one else would die if he could help it.
Daniel grabbed the drag handle of Hackett's vest and drug him towards the road, digging his heals into the sand to get traction.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some survivors from the convoy taking cover behind the elephant on the other side of the road, which also had sustained heavy damage in spite of it's massive armor plating. One of its tracks had been blown apart in the blast making moving it impossible, a pity given the fact that it was their best chance of escape.
He waved to the entrenched soldiers, trying to get their attention, but one of the more trigger happy ones fired at his movement and sent a round straight through his tricep, causing him to scream in pain and his vision to explode into color once again.
He writhed in agony for a moment longer before regaining his focus. He pushed Hackett down to the side of the embankment to protect him before beginning to pull himself closer towards the soldiers, using his good arm to drag himself onto the road.
The same soldier spotted him once again and raised his weapon, believing him to be an enemy combatant. Daniel winced, ready for the soldier's round to find it's mark, but before he could fire a woman grabbed the barrel of his weapon and stopped him.
She made a sweeping gesture towards him and pulled a stretcher and biofoam from her rucksack, before running over to him with three other soldiers in tow.
The four ran across the bomb blasted road, firing their weapons wildly at the enemy as they themselves took fire from all around them, with one of them taking a round straight to the center of his chest plate, which stopped the round dead, and continuing to move regardless.
When they reached him they dropped their weapons and knelt down next to him, looking him in the eye and asking him questions he couldn't understand for the life of him.
All he heard and saw was background noise and someone looking at him, talking with no sound coming out.
He blinked hard, letting them know he was alive, and yelped in pain as one of them began to apply biofoam to his wounds and loaded him onto the stretcher, carrying him back across the road as rounds rained down around them. He glanced to the other pair of soldiers who were carrying Hackett, and watched as rounds ripped through the air around them. One of them took one to the leg and he stumbled, dropping Hackett and tripping the other soldier.
The three of them barely managed to tumble to the safety of the wreckage of the destroyed EOD suit, with Hackett screaming in pain once again.
One of the soldiers on the elephant made a move for it's mounted weapon and used it to provide them with enough cover to narrowly make it back across the road.
The two soldiers that were carrying him brought him into the elephant and began to work on him, patching up his wounds as best they could. He fought to stay conscious, but the stinging pain of the biofoam being sprayed on his wounds was too much, and he knew his body was about to shut down soon to protect itself.
As his vision began to blacken at the edges, his last thought was of Emily, and how he wasn't going to let his own fear or anything else get in the way of telling her what he had to.
"And now that I'm without your kisses, I'll be needing stitches."