2 Chapter Two: Shoot Out

Her thoughts came back, slowly at first, as if her mind was waking up from hibernation. Then she opened her eyes, staring at the blue sky, trying to gather together the pieces of what had happened.

We were caught in a sandstorm... The chopper blades got bent... We went down...

Her mind registered two things at once. The first was the god awful headache she had. It felt like it would split her head in two, each pound ringing in her ears like a gunshot.

The second was that she was looking at a blue sky. When she crashed, she was in a helicopter. She should be seeing the gray of the helicopter's ceiling, not the blue sky.

She attempted to lift her head, planning on scanning her surroundings for the chopper, in case she had been thrown out. This failed, for as soon as she moved, even slightly, a shooting pain rocketed from her head to every inch of her body. She cried out, but the noise was drowned out by the steady thrum of her headache.

At least, she thought it was her headache, but with some focus, she realized her pounding head, and the thrum she heard, were two seperate beats.

Now curious, she wanted to get moving even more, but her headache was becoming debilitating. She had  no choice but to stay still, staring up at the sky, watching as the clouds lazily drifted across it. Any other time and she would have found this relaxing, but now, the thrumming was getting louder, the ground was starting to shake, and she began to hear gun shots ring out. Every instinct was screaming at her to move, find cover. And every single muscle refused to work. She had half a thought to call out to the two men who had been in the chopper with her; her father and her partner, but she thought otherwise.

If this is the enemy, I can't give their location away.

The thrumming seemed to be right next to her, the shots ringing out around her.

Thubalup thubalup BANG thubalup thubalup BANG

Over and over, the galloping of a horse and the sound of a pistol.

Impossible. It's something out of an old Wild West movie, not now.

As much as she denied it though, she knew what she heard. All rational thought made it seem impossible, but by what she heard, it seemed like she was in an old Wild West style shoot out.

A gun shot rang out, a horse neighed loudly, and something thumped beside her.

She turned her head to see a face staring at her, empty eyed, blood pooling around it. The face looked masculine, dark skinned with high cheek bones, blue and white colored paint around the eyes, forehead and cheeks. With her limited knowledge of wild West movies, she guessed this was an Indian, and so, the one shooting the gun would be a cowboy.

Hollers sounded above her, more galloping and the thrung of a bow string being released. Gunshots and bows, thunks of bodies falling from horses, terrified steeds galloping away. It all seemed so impossible, so cliché, so... Hollywood.

And yet, this is what she heard; this is what she saw (whenever they would come into view) there was no denying it. Either she had gotten stuck in the Wild West, in the middle of an Indian and cowboy shoot out; or she was delirious, hallucinating it all while she bled out in the rubble of the destroyed chopper. Whichever it was (although she was leaning towards hallucination) this is what she heard and saw, and until the headache passed and she could move, all she could do was rely on her remaining senses, hearing and sight, and they both told her she was in the Wild West. Her brain denied it, but she couldn't quite shake the feeling that what she heard... Might just be true.