Gordon Freeman

"I was going to insist on it." If only because he's the one with the regenerating powered armor and the assortment of weaponry- which reminds him.

"If you want one of my guns you're welcome to it. I don't know what we'll be meeting around here, but I saw a headcrab rocket when I arrived. I have a nasty feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more of that-" He jerks his chin towards the bisected zombie. "-before we make it to the road out of town."

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"I can't use a gun," Dinah replies, turning her face away from the creature with a combination of disgust and pity. "I won't use a gun. I'm better off with my fists, really."

She doesn't know how convincing it sounds, a school girl standing here in a sweater and pants, but he's just going to have to trust her.

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Gordon looks at her for a while in silence. Then he nods. "All right. Stay behind me," he says. "If you need a bludgeon, tell me."

It's a measure of how unnerved this place has him that he's willing to loan anybody else at all the crowbar.

"Keep an eye out for small moving things. These zombies used to be human, before the headcrabs got them. Anything the size of a chicken, moving or otherwise? Do whatever you have to to kill it, assuming I can't get at it first."

He then nods to the dark hallway in front of them and switches on his suit's flashlight. It's not much, but it's more than was there before. "Come on. I'll fill you in as we go."

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Dinah falls in beside him and a little back, but to the side so she's free to move.

"All I wanted to do is check you were OK," she complains in a light enough tone. "Yu hadn't been in the bar for a while."

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"Wasn't my idea," Gordon answers, picking his way down the hallway with extreme care. The residents of Ravenholm don't appear to have had much regard for where their trash wound up, at least not towards the end. "I went to bed the other night and woke up back in my world, twenty years after I left. And-"

Somewhere in the darkness up ahead, something stumbles. Gordon freezes. "One side," he murmurs, and points the orange gun back the way they came. There's a faint hum-

One of the big rotary sawblades they stepped over on the way here lifts from the floor and suddenly flies to a point directly in front of the gun barrel. One of the two zombies that had been lurking in the dark staggers into view, bloodied claws waving ahead of its eyeless, gorbling form.

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Dinah steps forward, now ahead of Gordon but to his side, alloing him full view of the zombies. Her fists are instantly up, poised before her face.

"Did your gun do that?"

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Gordon gives a very faint smile and points the blade at the zombie. There's a THUUNG! noise, and the blade hurls itself at the zombie edge-first with such speed that the thing's sliced neatly in half, just below the space where the internal organs used to be.

"Yep," he says. "Where's that one's headcrab? I think I saw it get loose-"

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He did. With a scream of animal rage, the blobby little thing leaps at Gordon's face. He whips his crowbar out of his equipment harness before it can do more than claw his forehead, but there's another threat staggering out of the shadows....

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Dinah's already on it. She leaves the headcrab to Gordon and spins towards the movement, launching herself with a flying kick straight at the thing. One kick, then a neat throw against the nearest wall.

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Breathing not being so much of a concern any more, having the wind badly knocked out of it doesn't seem to slow the zombie down as much as it should. It hits the wall with a wet squelch and begins trying to push itself upright.

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"The head! Take out the thing covering its head- that's all that's keeping it moving!" Gordon yells, having killed his headcrab and retrieved the sawblade.

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"Got it!" Dinah calls back. She doesn't hesitate, and kicks the crab thing hard, back against the wall behind it.

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There's a nasty crunch sound, and a muffled scream too high to have come from a human throat. The legs that hold the headcrab in its place spasm once and the monstrosity goes still.

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Gordon turns to examine the corpse, and slides his glasses back up his nose. "That should do it," he says. "Thank you. That was... impressive. Where'd you learn to do that?"

The crowbar's back in his belt; he has the orange gun in one hand, and it's still got the hovering sawblade directly in front of it.

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"My Mom," Dinah says, wiping some goo off the side of her sneaker onto the ground.

"She taught me Judo. A girl can't know enough self defense in Gotham."

It's deliberately sort of vague. She doesn't need to boast superhero credentials when she's just beaten a zombie single handedly.

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"Damn. And I thought Boston was bad." Gordon shakes his head. "All right. We should keep moving anyway. I'l take point- you watch our six."

She might only be a teenager, but as was said above: headcrab zombie killer. The things move slowly, but they move almost silently. If he doesn't have someone looking out behind them he'll never know they're coming until the first claw strikes.

"This isn't what I was dealing with at Black Mesa at all," Gordon notes as they make their way through the building. "This is worse. Much worse."

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Dinah nods and falls in behind him.

Ted's always told her how important it was to be aware of her surroundings at all times; to use - excuse the expression - constant vigilance just in case someone is approaching from behind. So she's actually kind of please that she can be trusted with that.

"Do you know what happened in those twenty years?"

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"I got briefed." Gordon grimaces. "The resonance cascade at Black Mesa got the attention of an alien empire called the Combine. They portal from universe to universe and conquer individual planets as they go. They ganged up on Earth a couple of years after Black Mesa."

"Earth surrendered in seven hours."

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Dinah's slight gasp is for entirely personal reasons. Alien invaders suck, right now.

"Oh my god."

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"Yeah," Gordon says. "They've had control of the planet ever since. What they don't hold outright is pretty much uninhabitable, since it's been overrun by alien wildlife. Like those headcrabs." He shakes his head, but slows his passage; there's light up ahead, and he has to be careful. "Anybody who angers the Combine gets 'disappeared'. Anybody who serves them willingly gets 'promoted' through cybernetics and massive mental and physical modification. And if a whole community pisses them off, the Combine starts loading headcrabs into rockets and shelling the living daylights out of the place, and it winds up just like here."

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At the end of the passage lies a small, halfhearted courtyard, with a leafless tree growing out of the center. A cluster of startled night-going crows lifts off at the two humans' approach.

To the right of the courtyard lies a cobblestoned alleyway, used in better times for loading and unloading cargo trucks and wagons. The stones are splashed with blood now- fairly fresh blood at that, scattered, most likely, by the whirring, rotating thing positioned in the center of the cobbles. It looks like half an airplane propeller mounted atop a small engine, if Ash Williams were ever to get his hands on such a thing.

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Dinah was already pretty horrified with sympathy at the story. The courtyard receives no reaction other than a scowl and a cautious look around, head up and alert.

"Are there resistance movements?"

He'd have found them if there were, right?

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"One that I know of," Gordon says. "Their nearest base got raided- they sent me here. There's another cluster of rebels on the far side of town, apparently. That's what we're aiming for."

There's a sound of footsteps from up ahead, on the far side of the whirring blade. Gordon readies the orange gun and the sawblade again.

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