Re: Quicklog, Bioshock: Elena M & Cris M
[Most young(ish) mothers weren't soldiers, weren't people who'd spent more time under blistering sun with sand in their boots, than at home with a baby in their arms, so it stood to reason, didn't it? It also stood to reason she should be holding up better than she was, but Cris chalked it up to bloodloss and the otherworldly murk and gloom, the tight-chested feeling that dogged you here, tying off windpipes and choking out lungs the way a blackhole chokes on a star—the feeling that you were minutes away from some catastrophe. He decided the Little Sisters had shaken her too and at least that he could understand.
The five minutes tapered into seconds and Elena nodded at him the dumb, wet-eyed nod of a doll, drawn deep inside his jacket with muting tears, and he took it. A buen hambre no hay pan duro. He nodded back, terse, and he led again, knapsack on both shoulders, the bulletproof vest thicker seeming now beneath bright white and the incisors of plastic buttons.
He moved in a crouch, pistol muzzle still down, lifting each time they came into a new space and he scanned it for movement. The spaces varied, but all were decorated by death—blood spattered and congealed like jelly on rich marble, intestines slick, wormy, and easy to trip over if you weren't careful, brains spewed jammy from bashed skulls and skin split from bone, and Cris just powered through. He breathed through his mouth, nose plugged, and he didn't stumble, stutter, shiver, or freeze. He just kept pushing them through rooms, up staircases, past decay that no one could lie and call beautiful. More rounds were fired, but he never stopped to check pulses, to recover ammo. As long as whoever it was stopped coming for them, he kept going.
They had to be close now. The signs in mid-century sans serifs were familiar, neon gas green, and he followed the map in his mind, seared there by a flood of adrenaline, and when he and Elena turned and the opulence gave way to caves dug out by anti-capitalists and opportunists, searock and ledges, water lapping loudly, and there was no hesitation as he stepped into it, freezing and nearly to the chest. He glanced only once over his shoulder to see if Elena was still there.]