Gordon Freeman

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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He needn't have worried. The two zombies that shamble into the plaza don't appear to understand the nature of the blade in front of them, because-

Well. They walk right into the thing.

As the WHACKITY SPLUD CHOP THUMP noises die away, from somewhere over the rooftops in the distance, a man's voice can be heard triumphantly proclaiming: "For it was said that they had become like those peculiar demons which dwell in matter, but in which no light may be found."

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Dinah's head whips towards the sound, squinting as if she might be able to see something. She doesn't say anything, however: just listens.

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Nothing. No sign of anyone.

No further zombies, either, which is something.

"I think there's a switch on the side of that thing," Gordon says. "If one of us can crawl in there and flip it we should be able to get past safely."

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Which one is obvious - Dinah's smaller and she's willing to bet she's more agile.

"That lever thing?" she asks for confirmation, before diving under the blades. Tucking her knees in tightly, she rolls to the centre of the propeller and pushes the lever up.

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The blade grumbles to a halt.

"... that'd do it, yeah."

The only way out from here is a set of low-lying stairs; everything else's been walled off. A light gleams dimly in the open room beyond: the interior of what might've been a barn, once. Now it's home to a stack of accumulated detritus: saw blades, engine parts, paint cans, and the like. Someone's been here recently, though. The white-and-green medkits in the corner attest to that. So does the switched-off chopper in the center of the room, identical in every way to the one outside.

As Gordon pulls one of the sawblades over with the gun, the scream of an enraged headcrab can be heard from the far end of the room. The little monster's leap draws the eye away from the bipedal forms lurching out of the shadows near the nailed-shut door.

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"Convenient, all these weapons around," Dinah remarks, giving a humourless half smile. "Stay back."

After giving that warning, she dives and rolls in the exact same way, this time switching the chopper on, before rolling out the other side: towards the zombies.

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