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

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

The Milliways portal door is a capricious, fickle thing. It had opened for Gordon earlier when he'd tripped over the charred, blackened remains of a lurking zombie while firing a sawblade into its still-mobile companion. Then it'd gone and opened again, back to Ravenholm, just as he was leaning forward to check and see whether the zombie that'd loomed over him before had gone.

The blade had flown true and eradicated the zombie threat, but in the moonlight that trickled through the cracks in the boarded-up window and badly patched roof, Gordon could see he still wasn't alone...

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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.

Gordon nods. "You heard the padre," he says. "We head for the church."

It's in the direction they were headed before, anyway, so why not? Besides, old churches tended to be sturdy buildings, right?

"I'd ask how far you can jump from roof to roof but I don't think either of us would like the answer." Gordon glances around. "If we can make it along that ledge there, on the warehouse, we'll get past a couple of fences below. The town square's on the other side- we can make a run for it there. You take point this time. I can hear more of those things coming."

She feels an idiot for falling like that, and scowls. But she doesn't object to the idea, and instead runs along the ledge, her determination helping to keep her centred.

Constantly looking back for him, she keeps alert all the way.

The course is really probably for the best. The alternative route involved diving into that cistern at the end of the street, climbing its ladder, taking an elevator down to street level, and having to jump a fence to escape a trapped, angry thing swollen with black headcrab bodies. This route crosses both the fences and brings Gordon and Dinah around to a boarded-up window overlooking the square...

... into which what remains of the population of Ravenholm is beginning to pour. Two, three, four at a time, they come, shuffling and wailing their horrid, muffled cries. And they just. Keep. Coming. The only real mercy here is that none of them seem to have been any less than full adults when they were still alive.

Gordon's throat moves convulsively at the sight, and he begins reloading the shotgun from a box of shells he snagged along the way.

A square of light opens in the wall of a large building diagonally opposite their current position. "How came you here, brother?" calls Father Grigori. "You have lost your way at the last! Did I not tell you to seek the church?"

As he points to a side alley that's still relatively zombie-free, he adds, "Mend your ways before it is too late!"

Gordon doesn't know whether to thank the man or punch him. "Think you can sprint that far once we're at ground level?" he asks Dinah.

"Yeah," Dinah says, eyes not leaving the square. "I'm a fast runner, don't worry about me."

"Good," says Gordon, and checks the shotgun one last time. "You're probably faster than me. I'll clear us a path."

He's had more nerve-wracking descents before this. They involved hundred-foot cliffside drops and lurking Marines. This isn't nearly so far to fall, but it's right up there.

Dinah's just glad she's in sneakers and not her Mom's high heeled boots for this.

She glances at him to makes sure he's ready with the gun, before crouching and dropping the distance easily, landing in a deep crouch.

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