acts_of_gord | We Don't Go To Ravenholm- Oh Wait, Looks Like We Do

"For as long as we can," Gordon agrees. "I'm used to that kind of thing. Will you be all right?"

"Yeah."

She's not sure, but she wipes her hands on her pants and nods firmly.

She's going to have to get used to it, after all.

"I'm good."

Gordon would say something, were he someone else, but he's aware of exactly how dangerous the wrong word at the right moment can be. He just nods. "This way," he says.

It looks as if Father Grigori is right. As they scramble from rooftop to rooftop- sometimes by means of a mere plank stretched across this street or that- Dinah will no doubt note that there are at least two or three zombies wandering blindly through each of the streets below. There's a moment when they have to stop; the zombies can't climb any more, but the headcrabs that haven't found a host are another story.

Let's just say that Dinah has a hell of a kick, shall we?

At least the moon's full and the clouds are few. A rooftop run like this would be a nightmare on a darker evening. Especially when the only way off one particular roof is to duck into a cramped, chemical-smelling attic. "I think this should come out on the next street," Gordon notes, "but we should be ready for anything around here."

Dinah does have a hell of a kick, and she's quite proud of it. She's also beginning to get flushed with the effort and the exhileration of action: she's enjoying herself, under the concentration and worry.

She climbs into the attic behind Gordon and wrinkles her nose at the smell, but aside from saying anything else, she nods.

Buildings in old towns like this are often so cheek-by-jowl that it doesn't really make that much of a difference which house you're in. The crawl space in the attic leads through a broken wall (painted with an orange lambda, which provokes a small smile from Gordon) into another building entirely. Up ahead, a man-sized gap in the slanting roof lets the moonlight in.

... enough to light up the zombie that's just lunged to its feet.

There's not a lot of room to move where they are, but Dinah's going to give it a damn good try. She lunges forward into the attic proper, landing ready to fight this thing however she needs to.

It turns out she doesn't need to, as a gunshot rings out and the creature falls.

"Ah!" calls a familiar voice from the opposite side of the moonlit street. "It is you, sister! I apologize, but no harm done. My bullets are the least of your concerns."

There's a hissing noise, and a sound like a cat's scream is abruptly cut off as Father Grigori's next round takes down one of the poison headcrabs.

"The two of you have stirred up hell! A pair after my own heart," the priest notes as he reloads his gun. Something in the building catches his attention, and he turns away from the window. A careful listener might well hear him intoning, "Although they call me crazy I care not, for thou art my helper, my strength, and my savior," as he vanishes into the depths of the building in a hail of further gunshots.

Dinah stares after him before turning to Gordon, concerned and curious all at once.

"Where from here?"

Gordon leans out the hole in the roof a ways and looks around. "We need to get to that building there," he says, pointing to one of the taller ones in the distance. "The street leads in the right direction, but it's crawling with zombies, and it ends at some kind of a... looks like a cistern or water tank or something. I don't like the idea of falling into that thing, do you?"

After some thought he adds, "There's a couple of girders running across the street down towards the cistern. If we can cross those we should be able to get into that brick building and make it to the roof from inside. Think you can manage that?"

Think being the operative word. Dinah likes beating things up at ground level.

"Yeah," she says, nodding firmly. "Yu go ahead I'll follow."

"All right."

Gordon sets out along the ledge that leads to the girders; they have the look of something that'd been in place long before zombies and crazy priests. Maybe there was a cargo unloading zone involved, or they'd been planning some sort of reconstruction or shelter- he doesn't know. They just seem solider than anything he's willing to attribute to the man with the penchant for pseudo-Scripture. Solid enough, in fact, that when he spots a zombie through one of the windows in the building where Father Grigori had once been shooting, he pauses to point his gravity gun at a pile of bricks on the ground, twenty or thirty feet below.

As the hail of bricks takes out the zombie in Grigori's building he calls out, "Come on over. We should be good."

"Right," Dinah says. She glances down quickly before following Gordon as fast as she dares.

She's alomst there when her foot slips to the side, and she's suddenly falling towards the street below.

Crap!

What follows is a remarkably un-super-heroic-looking set of maneuvers. Lacking the kind of training you see in millionaires named Wayne- and not trusting the gravity gun to act anything at all like the Bat-grapple- Gordon moves on instinct instead and sits down, fast. This is so that he can get his legs around the girder and his feet locked around each other at the ankles, a process that's still going on as he leans over to grab for Dinah's hand.

He'll pay for it in the morning, but he'll never not be paying for it if this doesn't work.

Dinah's hand reaches out sharply - alomst as quick as she falls, and her hand closes tight around Gordon's wrist.

Her shoulder jerks suddenly, but she stops falling.

"Nice catch."

"Thanks," says Gordon.

"Minor fractures detected," says the suit.

"Shut up," Gordon tells it, as he manages to stash the gravity gun awkwardly through his belt. "Okay. Two hands now, no slipping. Let's get you up here..."

She's going in front of him this time, when she gets up to the girder. Easier to keep an eye on her that way.

Dinah grimaces when the suit speaks, but she reaches up with her other hand and grabs his arm above his elbow, to swing herself back on to the girder. She may have slipped, but she's agile enough to get up without any difficulty.

"Yeah, let's not do that again."

She decides not to look down for the rest of the walk.

Gordon shakes out his arm a little, but it doesn't seem to hurt too badly. The suit seems to have compensated for most of the yanking. Nothing one of the green vials in a medkit won't cure, anyway.

The window they're aiming for opens onto a long, narrow room with stairs leading both downward and upward. Gordon glances at the downward stairs suspiciously, then steps forward and turns his suit light on the rest of the room. And has to suppress a shudder; there are corpses laid out on three tables, two of them visibly ex-zombies. If the cracked rib cages and clawed hands didn't give that away, the nearby headcrab corpses and mutilated skulls probably did. The third... the third appears to have been relieved of rather a lot of the things one would imagine even zombies might need, such as skin and most of its musculature. Gordon turns the light away from that one quickly. It happens to fall on a pile of torn, empty white boxes, and he gives a low whistle at that.

"Spent medkits," he explains to Dinah. "I'm not sure what they contain these days, but the ones we had at Black Mesa used alien chemical compounds to heal up anything short of limb loss or death. I think... I think Father Grigori may have been trying to use them to get these people back, and it didn't work."

"Oh god," Dinah says, not out of disgust or fear or anything other than pity.

"That poor guy."

Gordon nods soberly. "No wonder he's come off the rails," he murmurs.

Below them, in the streets, something howls. Gordon's head comes up sharply. "The roof. Now."

If nothing else they'll be able to get to the far side of the building before whatever that is catches up with them.

Dinah doesn't hesitate. She turns and races up the stairs, stopping only when she nears the top to make sure he's following.

He is. He's just taking a little longer to rip a radiator off the wall with the gravity gun. Something's got to serve as a shield behind them.

The moonlight reaching the Ravenholm streets reveals something scrambling about with a bizarre four-legged gait, at a speed the zombies Dinah's seen so far can't hope to match. It's making braying noises like some sort of wild ass- at least for a moment; then it pauses and lets out the same soulless howl as before.

The howl is cut off by a sudden WHAM!. Gordon made it onto the roof in time to be profoundly disturbed by the same sight. No sense carrying the radiator all this way and not using it.

And then comes the laughter, from the building across the way; Father Grigori, looking somewhat the worse for wear, holds up a hand in greeting. "Well done, brother!" he calls. "But I have a more suitable gun for you. Come closer."

For all his faults, the priest has an excellent pitching arm. Something black and silver flashes in the moonlight, arcing across the distance. Gordon catches the tossed shotgun out of midair.

"Good," says Father Grigori. "Now keep it close. My advice to you is... aim for the head."

The drainpipe nearest Gordon starts to rattle. Grigori hisses. "They come!" he says. "There is no rest in Ravenholm! Move on and I will meet you at the church."

He makes a vague gesture towards an onion-domed building in the distance before darting off into the shadows of the other building.

Dinah draws back and to the side to let the radiator do its work, then starts forward again.

"OK, what was that?"

"I think..." Gordon shakes his head slowly. "I think we need to back up right now, Dinah."

And as he does so, the howl sounds again. The pipe shakes- and two things out of nightmare leap up onto the roof in front of them. One never completes its arc, because Gordon, for all his other flaws, can take advice very, very well.

He likes that shotgun, oh yes.

Dinah still doesn't want or need a gun. She advances on the other zombie as fast asit moves itself, landing kicks and strikes in rapid succession before she can throw it back off the roof.

"We should move."

Obviously.

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