The Shot

They called it "The Shot". Not the kind that involved a glass of liquor or a bullet between the eyes. But in its own way, Allison supposed, what she held between her fingers was just as soothing as the former-- and as final as the latter. 
"It's not so bad, is it, Doc?"
Those had been Lance Corporal Bahati's last words before she fell into unconsciousness, barely audible over the chattering of combined machine gun fire. Allison had no time to answer before the marine lost consciousness. Maybe that was a kindness. As a Hospital Corpsman attached to an ODST combat team, Allison Lloyd was paid to do a lot of extraordinary things. But lying to a dying woman wasn't one of them.
Bahati had been keeping pressure on the nasty wound in her abdomen like the corpsman had told her to do, but when she passed out, her arms lost all strength, and they fell at her side, caked in blood. Not like it mattered much at this point anyway. If you were quick enough, a shot to the gut like this from a Covenant Needle Rifle wasn't always fatal. Extract the shard, fill up the wound with biofoam, and you'd live. Probably.
But Bahati hadn't been fast enough. And the shard detonated, turning what should have been a purple heart and some rest in a hospital bed for the marine into a folded flag and a family who would never see their daughter or mother again.
At that, Allison remembered what it was like, seeing the man in uniform, standing in her doorway. How her mother had shoo'd her and her brother away. And the sobbing noises her mother made, when she thought her children couldn't hear her.
Bahati groaned in agony, sweat beading down her forehead. She didn't open her eyes, but her hands scrambled at the dirt around her, as if she was searching for something. And she didn't stop, until her fingers found Allison's gloved hand.
She didn't even know this Lance Corporal Bahati, not really. Her unit had dropped here to reinforce the 51st Marine Battalion, and make sure the Covenant didn't break through this position. Bahati had been one of the gunners up on the wall, mowing down wave after wave of the diminutive, feral Unggoy in the dead of night. Every muzzle flash lighting up the world as bright as day for but a moment. Until the battlefield was littered with so many of the squat little aliens that no bare patch of earth remained. 
By then, whoever was in charge of the Covenant's ground game decided that the Unggoy needed more of a helping hand, and started deploying the elusive, and deadly accurate Kig-Yar as snipers to whittle down the human defenses. Which of course, included Bahati.
Allison didn't know what was running through Bahati's mind when she first got hit-- and kept on firing anyway. Did she just not even notice the shard, in the heat of battle, with all the adrenaline in her system?  Was she just that determined to fight, to deny the Covenant every last inch of ground for as long as she could? Or, perhaps, did she fly into a rage, and tried to take her killer down with her?
Maybe a little of all three, or some fourth explanation that Allison could not fathom. It was a question without an answer. And that was just something that drove her crazy. Not just the not knowing-- but having to deal with the fact that she'd never know, for as long as she lived. However long that was.
No matter what the answer, fact was, Bahati was a fighter. And she deserved more than anything a random corpsman could offer. But all Allison had was the Shot.
Technically, the drug was meant for ODSTs far behind the front lines, where the extraction of a wounded comrade was unlikely or impossible. But that didn't matter. Allison 'technically' wasn't an ODST herself, but if the roles were reversed-- she would certainly hope that Bahati would do her this first, and last favor.
Her own hands were caked with blood when she rolled up Bahati's sleeve, found the vein, and injected her with the narcotic. Bahati's pulse slowed, and the tension in her muscles relaxed. The corpsman logged the time of death. Allison didn't know if it was right to call the face she wore "peaceful"-- but at least, she wasn't struggling. Not anymore. The fight, at least for her, was over.
"Lloyd!"
The gruff voice of her Staff Sergeant barked within her helmet, and in an instant, she took all the information she had about Lance Corporal Bahati, and filed it away in some dark corner of her mind. Alongside all the others.
"I need you up here!"
She heard the twin, dull thumps of a SPNKr rocket launcher, followed by the pair of resulting ka-booms off in the distance. When she turned to look, she managed to glimpse the two fireballs as they curled up into the air, and regressed into inky black smoke, barely distinguishable against the night sky. There were some scattered cheers from the wall's defenders-- until somebody tumbled backwards and fell. A bright pink crystalline shard lodged in their eye socket.
Nobody she knew. Nobody she would ever know.
Allison tucked her chin, and keyed her helmet mic twice in acknowledgement. Her gaze lingered on Bahati for a moment as she inspected her rifle. And then she moved on.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories