acts_of_gord | (no subject)

Gordon knows the sound of those rotors. It's doubtful he'll forget it as long as he lives. Those are gunship rotors, at least one, possibly two. So he's understandably skittish as he hedges up to the mine exit and peers out. The all-too-familiar shape of a Strider is lumbering along an elevated roadway in the distance, followed by tiny moving specks that might be Overwatch or might be Elites, and that not-quite-British woman's voice echoes from speakers somewhere out of sight:

"All autonomous units: Accept mandatory sector assimilation. Coordinated constriction underway. Debride and cauterize. Entering phase nine, enhanced compliance. Deploy advisory control and oversight. Submit and be subsumed."

... this can't end well.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

acts_of_gord

Gordon suppresses a sigh at that, and holsters his gun. There's only one thing that a stuck elevator means any more: time for Dr. Freeman to play maintenance man.

Okay, maintenance man and killer of headcrabs. There's a ladder that leads up to a narrow path better suited to singletrack biking than human feet, and just before the hairpin turn that heralds the path growing narrower there's a recently-expended headcrab rocket that disgorges a hissing black headcrab at him. It gets smashed to a pulp with the crowbar for its pains. Gordon's still grumbling under his breath about it when he reaches the elevator and pulls the emergency hatch open.

Who the hell jams a pickaxe into an elevator's emergency drop control lever, anyway?

From:

vance_prime

Somebody who doesn't want anybody coming in through that entry point.

"Puzzling," the Vortigaunt murmurs as the three of them ascend. "The sentries should have spotted us by now."

"You think the Combine found them?"

"Such a theory is hardly far-fetched."

From:

acts_of_gord

A long, narrow passage wends its way from the elevator to a door jammed half-open. Gordon crouches down to look beyond and winces. The dead are all too numerous. That headcrab rocket on the slope must've been meant to soften this place up.

From:

vance_prime

"Oh God," breathes Alyx when she catches sight of the carnage. "The Combine found them, all right..."

"But came to no good end themselves. Headcrabs have had their way with both parties."

At least they didn't use up all of their medical supplies before shuffling off the mortal coil. Alyx digs a couple of medvials out of the muck and hands them to Gordon.

From:

acts_of_gord

"Thanks," Gordon murmurs gratefully. He starts prying the lids off and chugging them as fast as he can. The stuff's nasty, but it's not as bad if it goes down quickly. Eventually the background radiation of his nervous system subsides to a dull throb, so to speak, and he glances around. Not far away there's a mostly-intact fence overlooking a steep drop into some kind of industrial facility's working yard below. Beyond that, as he gets closer to the fence, there's a rusted, broken bridge still somehow balanced on its one remaining set of support pylons. The mist from the river below makes it hard to pick out more detail than that, at least for him.

From:

vance_prime

Alyx has the benefit of 20/20 vision and no corrective lenses to get smeared with antlion guts.

"Hey, look! Out on that bridge--I think I see the car you were talking about." There's a Combine security console set up nearby; tapping into a camera feed confirms the car's presence on the far side of the canyon.

"It appears they attempted an escape," says the Vortigaunt, "but made it no farther than the abyss."

"Well," says Alyx thoughtfully, "If they got it over there, maybe we can jump it back to this side?"

The Vortigaunt nods. "We recommend the Freeman for this task."

"Hey!" Alyx protests. "I'm feeling a lot better..."

"That condition will not last long if you plunge into the toxins below. We would do well to lend our protection from above, while Freeman skirts the hazards in the pit."

From:

acts_of_gord

Toxins? What? Gordon leans out as far as he dares through the hole in the fence, and looks down.

... oh. Industrial New Jersey. He should've known. At this rate, by the time he gets to White Forest he's going to have more weird chemicals in his blood than Hunter S. Thompson.

With a sigh he pulls back and heads towards the force-field blocking the door. "This mounted gun may prove useful," the Vortigaunt notes, indicating a sniper rifle overlooking the industrial yard. "Though it would appear to be powerless..."

From:

vance_prime

~~We can't stop here, this is antlion country!~~

"That I can fix," says Alyx. "Just give me a few minutes."

She may not be able to fight alongside Gordon, but by God she can do something.

From:

acts_of_gord

Gordon takes the opportunity to head back over to those corpses. Sure enough, several of the Combine dead were carrying pulse rifles- or at least pulse rifle ammo. That's likely to come in handy if there are zombies about, and given that rocket, there probably are.

From:

vance_prime

"Go, Freeman," the Vortigaunt urges. "I will look after the Alyx Vance."

Alyx sighs and shrugs. "...well, Gordon, I guess it's all up to you. Here, I'll get this field down." A quick zap from her hacking probe and it's done.

"Good luck, Gordon. Careful, now..."

From:

acts_of_gord

"Thank you," murmurs Gordon, and leans over to press his lips very briefly against her cheek. He'd do more, but... eh, not in front of the Vortigaunt.

Then it's off into the industrial complex, which is riddled with carts and crates left behind by those who used to work here. There don't appear to be any marked exit passages or emergency stairs, of course. That would be too easy.

From:

smelltheashes

From below comes the sound of something breathing--short, hoarse, panting breaths, almost like laughter.

There's nothing funny about what's waiting down there, though.

From:

acts_of_gord

Aw, hell. The pulse rifle is nice for most things, but Gordon knows that sound. That's a poison zombie coming for him, and that? Rates grenades. Because he does not want any of those hissing little nasties getting the jump on him, oh no he does not.

Two grenades. As he recalls, the poison zombies are harder to take down than most. Plus, sometimes their passengers jump ship before they die.

From:

smelltheashes

The zombie bursts through the door just before the first grenade detonates, sending wood splinters flying everywhere. The second grenade sends it keeling over. There's at least one headcrab still alive, though, scuttling into a far corner of the room.

From:

acts_of_gord

Not for long. Gordon didn't go looking for pulse rifle ammo just to have weight in his pockets. He's had more than his share of "Neurotoxin detected" messages from the suit and that thing's going to die before he goes any further.

From:

smelltheashes

And die it does.

So do the two others waiting down by the jammed-beyond-repair elevator.

From:

acts_of_gord

He's never going to be able to hear a cat yowl again as long as he lives without shuddering, and at this point, he doesn't care. Gordon prods the corpse with his toe a moment to make sure it's dead, then moves on. The next door leads to a fenced-in staircase on the outer wall of the building, albeit one with what looks like a collapsed zombie on the landing below...

From:

smelltheashes

The zombie stirs and starts to get to its feet--

CRACK

--and abruptly drops again.

A line of blue laser light flickers across the stairwell. "Hey!" Alyx's voice echoes down from above. "We got the rifle charged up!"

From:

acts_of_gord

"Nice work!" Gordon calls back, and presses on.

There's some kind of a shaft where he can hear what might be the braying of an anguished zombie far below. He's not going to get close enough to check.

There's a room where the ceiling is thick with barnacles in several places and his only way around a crashed headcrab rocket is across some of the ricketiest-looking boards he can remember seeing- which are, of course, stretched over a drop he knows damn well will kill him even in the suit. That one merits running.

There's more barnacles on the other side, and then there's the flame trap someone rigged up- oh, this is where the zombie sounds were coming from...

Gordon doesn't like the zombies. Never has. He's always assumed they were dead long before he got to them. But that noise they make when they're on fire is painful to listen to. For the sake of the person it used to be, Gordon cuts down the wailing zombie with gunfire before cranking the gas valve shut and waiting for the flames to die down. There's another zombie waiting beyond, and a zombine staggering about at the bottom of the stairs beyond, and...

No. No, he is not going to open the side door to see what lies beyond it. No. It's stout enough that a zombie won't crash through it, and he's almost certain that if he just keeps going down the stairs he'll make it back to outside again.

From:

smelltheashes

He does, indeed, make it back outside again. There's a narrow passage along the side of the building; a chain-link fence separates Gordon from the toxic sludge in the riverbed below. There's a dumpster on one end of the passage, and a padlocked door on the--

Wait.

Did something just move in the dumpster?

From:

acts_of_gord

In any kind of normal world, that would be a raccoon or a rat or something. This is, however, Gordon's world, and they're a good half a light year over the abnormality event horizon and accelerating. Thus, he's hucking a grenade in there, just in case.

From:

smelltheashes

...a raccoon or a rat wouldn't huck the grenade back at you.

From:

acts_of_gord

No they would not! Gordon doesn't have the seconds he'd need to get the gravity gun out; he's just gonna fall back as far as he can before the explosion, and then creep forward. Whatever's in there, it's going to need killing from closer up.

From:

smelltheashes

More rustling and jostling noises, but no sign of whatever's making them. Even if Gordon manages to peer over the rim of the dumpster, he'll see nothing but piled cardboard boxes.

From:

acts_of_gord

Hnnf. Fine. He's not about to climb in there after it, so he'll leave it to its digging and head out of here...

... backing away, mind you, because he has a really bad feeling about this.