Time was of the essence, but telling that to Kleiner was like speaking to a brick wall. Of course, Barney had nothing but the utmost respect for the guy - Isaac was a good man with good intentions and was surprisingly resilient for such a stodgy academic - but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the hour glass was running out of sand. His boots clopped against the floor, echoing broadly across the lab, as he paced nervously from wall to wall. A trapped animal, desperate for escape. The only thing standing between him and safety was…
“Are you positive we don’t have the time to transport the teleporter? It is so close to being finished, and once we’re done, it’ll be a revolutionary step in—”
“Just grab your notes,” Barney says bluntly.
There’s acid in his voice, and it fuels an anger in the old man’s eyes that he’s never seen before. At least, not directed at him. It rubs him the wrong way, frankly. There are bigger things at stake than some contraption that’s just as likely to slingshot you across time and space as it is to tear you inside out.
“If this teleporter falls into the wrong hands—”
“We can build another.” Barney takes a massive drag off of his cigarette, leaving little more than a stub. It’s the last he reckons he’ll get for awhile. “You get got, we ain’t got a prayer. I’ll make sure that teleporter is as good as junked before I head out.”
“With all due respect, I don’t think that the Combine is going to come kicking down the door anytime soon. We have the time to relocate gradually and preserve my work. They know what you look like, yes, but you’ve always been careful, Barney. I highly doubt that they’ve seen you coming and going—”
“And with all due respect, doc, you don’t know what kind of tracking gear they mighta gotten on me. The Combine’s got a lot more going on behind the scenes than you think.”
Even he doesn’t fully know what the Combine’s surveillance apparatus consists of, and he’s been in this business a long time. But he’s seen glimpses. Airships that groan and bleed and breathe as animals would. Microchips squeezed out of a young recruit’s arm like botfly larvae. He can’t repress the shudder that crawls down his back.
After thumbing at the crook of his elbow, subconsciously feeling for one of those telltale bumps, Barney commands, “We don’t got time to argue about this, but we’ll have time to rebuild another goddamn machine once you’re safe. Now get your things. I’ll burn whatever you don’t grab—”
“I’d just need a couple of days, Barney!” Kleiner pleads, voice hot.
“I already told you we don’t got a couple of days!”
“And I don’t think I’ll have another twenty years to save humanity, Mr. Calhoun! We’re already at the cusp of ‘no return’ as it is!”
Rage colors Kleiner’s voice and bleeds into his eyes, going wide. Instinctively, Barney responds to it in kind. The two men stop. They stiffen. They glare at each other like angry dogs waiting for the other to make the first move, to invite their opponent to bite. But the fact of the matter is that Barney is a scrapper, and Kleiner most definitely is not. For all the heart he has, for all the good intentions and optimism, the good doctor knows he is outmatched.
Despite this - the adrenaline, the spiking heartbeat of a confrontation - Barney can’t help but feel like he’s crossed a line. He closes his eyes, loosens his shoulders. Visibly backing down.
When Kleiner next speaks, his voice cracks. “I… I can’t fail, Barney. Not again. Not when all of this is our fault to begin with. I just can’t bear the idea of letting down the brave few our actions have yet to…”
He leaves the last word unspoken, but Barney can imagine it. Kill.
Barney feels it, too. A stinging behind his eyes. Grief, fear, and regret in equal measure, but he’s long forgotten how to cry and it remains an uncomfortable, tight sensation in his face that he can’t will away. He flicks his cigarette butt to the ground and grinds it out with his heel. Then he lets out a cleansing sigh and tries to look sympathetic. He’s not sure if he remembers how to do that, either.
“C’mon, doc. You didn’t know it’d pan out like this,” he says softly. “Nobody did. Nobody in their right mind would dream of all this.”
“You did,” Kleiner responds. His eyes are sad, his voice matter-of-fact.
He seems smaller as he continues to shuffle around, opening drawers and yanking out stained, loose A4 that doesn’t seem to be in any particular order, folders decorated with colorful sticky notes. The doc’s got cardboard boxes of scientific papers and notes he’s refined over the years, the last legacy of former collaborators who got nabbed in the early days of the occupation. Or worse. Some get shoved into the “keep” pile. The rest accumulate in a different, less essential pile, one that’s grown to be much larger.
He sees Kleiner grab a faded binder with “ROSENBERG” written on the side, in thick black magic marker. Barney’s heart sinks into his stomach. The two share a morose glance before it, too, joins the first.
“What do you mean by that?” Barney asks, struggling to sound sincere when he chuckles. “I didn’t know anything, either. Not a goddamn thing.” He’s not some egghead with a fancy degree. He went to Martinson for two years, and their certification courses don’t even last two years. Most of his time was spent reading tabloids and jerking off.
“But you always talked about the aliens.” Kleiner fans idly through a legal pad and decides he needs the whole thing. “All those mystery books in your locker, all those warnings about Independence Day.”
“Yeah, but I was just young and stupid. I don’t know if I really believed it. It was just nice to be enthusiastic about something.”
Kleiner nearly cracks a smile, but it dies when he hears a crash in the distance. Glass breaking, metal clanging against concrete. They stand as still as rabbits in a field, eyes jerking in the direction of the noise. Barney struggles to hold his breath with the burn of nicotine still fresh in his lungs, and his heart explodes like fireworks in his ears.
“Lamarr?” Kleiner says quietly, barely above a whisper.
But there’s more clattering and stomping and voices now, too. Garbled voices, like a badly tuned radio, that echo throughout the halls just outside the lab entrance. Last Barney checked, headcrabs can’t talk. At least not coherently.
“Fuck!” Barney hisses, and he doesn’t bother being quiet. They’re already coming, they’re already here. He dives past Kleiner and grabs one of the cardboard boxes of notes, Rosenberg’s name visible over the edge, and tucks it under his arm. His other hand lashes out to Kleiner, grabbing him by the wrist so tight that he knows he’ll leave a bruise.
Off he runs, but he isn’t sure where to go; he hits a wall, stops, and doubles back. Like a decapitated chicken. He instinctively races toward the entrance, but the voices are closer now. He can hear radios beeping with incoming transmissions.
But why not his radio? He still has it on!
It takes awhile for the realization to dawn that they’d likely cut him off the moment they realized who he was, so as to catch him by surprise. And surprise him they did, because this is faster than he’s ever seen CP act before. Which brings to mind that perhaps they’ve brought in something beyond Civil Protection. That'd make this whole affair ten times worse. At least the metrocops were still human.
“The teleporter!” Kleiner hollers, but Barney doesn’t believe that’s wise. Too unreliable. Look at what it did to Gordon, and the fact it spat Freeman out into broad daylight was the whole reason they got into this mess. Sure, it could take him directly to Eli, but what if it also took him directly to Breen? Or Nova Prospekt? Or some far-flung antlion pit where the bugs ain’t seen food in ages?
No. Barney grits his teeth and races down a side passage, where the floor crumbles and leads to levels below. He takes the box under his arm and chucks it down, a trail of notes fluttering lazily into the dark. Kleiner protests, but there’s knocking now, and it’s not the neighborly knocking of the rebel next door needing a cup of sugar. It’s boots on crunching fiberglass, creaking metal. That goddamn vending machine they hide themselves with ain’t gonna hold.
Kleiner wiggles out of his grip and Barney wrestles him back in, places gloved hands on his shoulders and holds him so firmly in place that he’s afraid he’s hurting him. The old man trembles in his grip, wringing his hands together and muttering indecipherable and utterly useless bullshit about the teleporter, his life’s work, the fact Eli is so far away and he doesn’t know where else to go.
“Do you trust me?” Barney demands. The words shoot out of his mouth just as he hears the door behind him give.
“O-Of course I do—”
“Then take this.” He unclips his stun baton and shoves it into Kleiner’s hands. “And get out.”
“Barney, I—”
“I’ll catch up. Promise. I’ll bring you more of those peaches.”
And, with that, he shoves Kleiner down into the dark. Through a hole in the floor that should have been boarded up weeks ago but thankfully escaped everyone’s notice. He hears the doc tumble, hears him yelp. He hears Kleiner begging him to come with him, but he silences the call when he starts shoving anything he can over the gap.
Boxes. Trash cans. Garbage. Anything. He can hear the voices getting closer and he knows he doesn’t have much time, and if the Combine see Kleiner - if the Combine catch him - it’s game over. The end. Eli may have been a remarkable scientist in his own right, but you can’t finish a puzzle without all the pieces. The resistance needed both of the brightest minds humanity had to offer, not just one with half of the knowledge and know-how.
However, Barney himself is… just a guy. Plain and simple. He knows this, he’s accepted it, and he long knew this day would come as much as he’d wished it wouldn’t. He wasn’t a scientist; he wasn’t even particularly good at math.
He’s a piece from another picture that got mixed into the box by accident. It won’t matter if he’s gone.
“Acceptable losses,” he whispers grimly to himself as he presents a grenade from his belt. He pops it into the air like a freshly picked apple and catches it with finesse, darkly pleased that he’ll at least meet his end like a character in one of his old action flicks.
He glances up and sees shadows, rushing past him like he doesn’t exist, off in the direction of the teleporter and Kleiner’s life’s work.
With a deep breath, he pulls the pin and joins the stampede.
Up above, Gordon catches glimpses of clear blue sky through the grates, occasionally interrupted by the errant Combine soldier rappelling down to stop them. In theory. In practice, they get just enough time to touch down before Gordon and Benrey blast them backwards. Benrey’s trying for trickshots, whooping whenever he gets them clean in the head, while Gordon’s adopted more of a “spray and pray” playstyle.
They scale ladders, tiptoe over makeshift bridges of plywood and rebar, bump and shove each other and get into arguing matches that end with both of them falling on their ass into an adjacent channel. All the better, really, because this particular channel leads them to the outdoors, even if sopping wet and mutually irritated. Gordon shakes his head like a wet dog, flinging water onto every adjacent surface. Benrey included.
Unfortunately, while the sun might warm his skin and fill him with a newfound sense of purpose, it also illuminates what lies below the little outcropping they find themselves standing on. Which is, uh, green. Brown. Yellow. All unpleasantly organic colors. They coalesce in a pool that manages to appear both oily and lumpy, looking like a Hollandaise sauce that’s broken. And maybe left to fester in the sun for a couple years. It’s got a smell to match, one that makes Gordon gag.
“Christ, it smells like something died,” he chokes out.
“maybe you should… uh… take a bath.”
Gordon’s mouth opens on an angry retort, then he stops to consider this. A sniff at the neckline of his undersuit doesn’t really prove anything one way or the other, overwhelmed as his olfactory bulb is by the abattoir stench around him. But he feels pretty certain that, yeah, he could really use a bath. He’s been running around in a disused sewer system for how long, now? He couldn’t even tell you.
“Well, you just let me know if you see one around here,” Gordon says.
His day only gets worse when he realizes that the only way forward is down. His previous sentiment holds all the more: he would really, really like a bath, because as waterproof as this HEV suit purports itself to be, he has his fucking doubts. This thing’s made of some kind of carbon fiber composite, not, like, rubber. The muck clings aggressively to his boots, resisting any effort to shake it off, and even if it’s not getting through to the inner layers, Gordon’s mind convinces itself that he can feel something wet and cold seeping through and he can’t restrain the full-body shudder that wracks him.
And, to add insult to injury, this shit is slippery. He yelps as his first step sends him skidding forward, arms windmilling at his sides in a frantic effort to keep him upright and not faceplant into a goop that looks like it harbors a dozen diseases as yet unknown to science.
“wuh-oh, butterfingers,” Benrey taunts as he slides around without a care in the world.
“Fuck off! You’re gonna make me lose my balance!”
Somehow, he manages to propel himself forward without actually doing so. The pool of muck feeds into a squat, wide opening in the foundation of the opposite building, its path lined with stray bricks and wooden debris and, to Gordon’s surprise, discarded furniture. A noise fades into earshot the further inward they proceed: the faint hiss of static.
When Gordon slows to a stop, the muck giving way to dry ground at last, he finds himself in an open concrete corridor once walled off by chainlink fence. Its doors stand open, inviting them into a den piled high with wooden boxes and ammo crates. Nestled among them are the trappings of a Resistance outpost: a radio here, a first aid kit there, cartridges and half-assembled guns lying on all available flat surfaces. But there’s nobody there to man it. A green light on the front of the radio suggests that whoever was here, they must have fled, in too much of a hurry to turn it off.
A microphone dangles off the edge of the table. That’s new. Gordon picks it up and fiddles with it, bringing it to his mouth to say, “Hello? Hellooo? Anybody there? Uh, over.” But he receives no answer other than the ongoing hiss.
Most of the other channels he turns the dial to give much the same response. His heart skips with excitement when, near the end of the band, he picks up the first garbled strains of a man’s voice, but it’s short-lived.
“…public enemy number one,” he makes out. It’s that particular mild-mannered speech of Dr. Breen, with all the authority of his dad telling him that he’s not mad, just disappointed. “Any citizen who attempts to contact, shelter, or otherwise assist Gordon Freeman will be subject to immediate criminal prosecution. We have already apprehended—”
“Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” Gordon says. He flicks the switch off, silencing the broadcast. Then he turns back to Benrey and asks, “I don’t think they’d care if we took some of this stuff, right? I’m not totally sure how this faction stuff works.”
“you’re going to gain bounty.”
“Yeah, okay. I don’t even think they have money here, man. Have you seen a fucking dollar since we got here? Or, uh, I don’t know, the dignified Bulgarian dinar?” Gordon jams excess cartridges into the lining of his suit.
“5 gold coins for stealing,” Benrey says, watching him with disinterest.
“Look, the whole reason they’re here is to help us! That Matt guy didn’t care about us taking his stuff. Hell, I bet they’d be glad to help, like, ‘oh, Gordon Freeman, savior of the free world, please take my guns and autograph my baby’.”
Benrey cackles, surprising even himself. Gordon can’t fight the grin that crawls onto his face. “don’t you have your own baby to autograph?”
“What?”
“your, uh, bouncing baby boy? the one in your locker?” Benrey thinks for a moment. “jotchua?”
Gordon’s eyebrows scrunch up, utterly bewildered. Then it hits him. “Wait, you mean— Joshua? Oh, no no no,” he laughs, both relieved and embarrassed, “that’s not— Joshua’s not real, man. It was a joke. I, uhh, I kind of panicked? I didn’t know whose fucking baby that was.” He rubs the back of his neck.
To his surprise, Benrey’s face falls. “wait… what? joshie’s not…”
“Man, do I look like I have a baby?” That’s not the best comeback, he realizes. He’s got more grey hairs and exhausted wrinkles than any 27-year-old ought to have. But that’s all MIT, baby. MIT and a neurotic disposition from birth.
He starts down the long, dirt-lined hall before him, shafts of light from windows high on its walls casting piles of debris down its length into heavy shadow.
“I am, like, the last person who should be having a kid,” Gordon insists instead. “I can’t even— I had panic attacks just trying to take care of you guys, back in Black Mesa. And I didn’t have to worry about keeping you all fed and watered and shit. What makes you think I’m dad material?”
“i dunno,” Benrey mumbles.
Gordon peers at him, taking in what looks to be genuine disappointment written on Benrey’s face. And the way he isn’t meeting Gordon’s eyes. That’s… weird. It almost makes Gordon feel kind of bad for him. “Is this actually bumming you out? Like, for real?”
“babies are cool.” A nonsequitur. “like… among us babies.” A worse nonsequitur.
“Why are you saying that.”
The path out of here sees him tiptoeing through mud, ducking under tetanus-ripe wrecks of steel, and weaving through mazes of wooden pallets stacked haphazardly against the walls. He gets the feeling that this, like the boarded-up waystation before, is some kind of last-ditch effort to keep something out. If he were a Combine grunt, he’d be real fuckin’ annoyed by the time he managed to get through this little obstacle course, that’s for sure.
“just thought it would be cool. hang out with a baby.”
He snorts. “Benrey, even if I was a dad, there is no fucking way I would let you hang out with my baby. You’re a bad influence!”
“what? i am not,” Benrey insists hotly. “i could teach a baby good. there’s like… fingerpainting… self-defense…”
Gordon stops, halfway through crawling under a tarp, to laugh so hard he can’t breathe.
Just ahead, the sun hangs high in the sky, and the hall opens into an expanse of dirt, studded with makeshift awnings and fences of corrugated steel. Stark concrete buildings lurch out of the ground around them like crooked teeth. “Hey, look,” he says, looking back at Benrey, “I think we’re finally out of the fucking sewers!”
Gordon stands up fully and plants his hands on his hips, taking a deep breath as if to savor the moment. This is inadvisable, because it still smells like the fucking sewers, and he regrets it the moment he does it. Still. It feels good to finally be in the open air, where he can feel sunlight on his skin, or what little of it is exposed, anyway. And he’s got room to stand more than a foot or two away from Benrey. (He doesn’t really make a motion to do so, but it’s the principle of the thing.)
He expects gunshots, or Combine, or something, but the air hangs thickly around them, stagnant and silent. Near a shack with open walls, he spots what looks like some kind of rocket, a payload the size of a man lodged deep in the earth, ringed with fins at its base. Gordon gives it a wide berth. Was it… supposed to explode? He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t want to find out.
Under the metal eaves, there are chairs, mattresses, disused wooden boxes turned into tables, laden with dirty plastic dishes and meals half-eaten. A water-damaged book, carelessly tossed to the ground. Blood splattered on the wall. Gordon stops and stares.
It’s a dark, almost black shade, spilling from floor to ceiling, a broad splash wider across than even himself. He steps closer. The texture isn’t flat like he expects, or even laminar, but thick, lumpy, like impasto. His imagination runs wild, conjuring images of some poor citizen hurled against the wall with such a force that they splatter into nothing. Just this: a smear, wet and dripping. Something compels him to reach out. He presses his fingertips against the edge, and the smear gives under his touch.
Then he rubs them together. Threads coagulate and tangle. Equations flit through his head. How do you even begin to process fluid motion like this? Tensor flows, Navier and Stokes brought to their knees by the sheer computational power operating between his fingertips… The silhouette sharpens. The ground recedes from his view. A sharp spike of anxiety lances him.
Gordon hurriedly wipes his fingers on the wall, leaving a thin black streak behind.
Chainlink fence substitutes for corrugated steel on occasion, giving Gordon a window through the fences that divide this stretch of shacks from the next. On the other side, a battered couch sits opposite a coffee table, cast in shadow. And, slumped over in a sitting position, a motionless dark figure. It doesn’t react when Gordon presses against the fence for a better look.
“Jesus,” he mutters. His fingers clench in the metal lattice. Poor fucker.
He turns and heads away, hand trailing along the fence, but then—
Clang!
Gordon yelps— Something big, hulking, slamming against him, furiously pounding on the fence—
A man lurches, jumpsuit drenched in blood, open windpipe rattling with a hollow moan; where once there was a head, there remains only a stump, mounted and controlled by a headcrab. The crab rears up at him, exposing a fleshy, red interior, wet and toothy and howling in agony. Cold fear roots Gordon in place. He can’t move, can’t so much as curl his fingers around his crowbar to fight it off—
Then there comes a single, explosive pop from behind him. The monster falls, blood spraying from the back of its head. Gordon finds his breath again, then, like he’s moving through molasses, he slowly turns to face the source: Benrey, both hands wrapped around the grip of his pistol.
“Nice shot,” Gordon says, hoarse with a terror that hasn’t quite bled out of him yet.
He moves more carefully after that, peeking around corners before he advances. And well he should: they get the drop on a handful of solitary headcrabs up ahead, scrabbling around aimlessly in search of new hosts. They burrow up from the ground and crawl from the rear hatches of payloads similar to the last. Gordon wonders if that’s how they ended up here in the first place. Some kind of targeted attack? Was the Combine weaponizing them?
The walls of these ramshackle homes give way to rubble up ahead, demolished by the Combine’s missiles. They may not have been explosive, but it doesn’t take much to raze a shanty town like this to the ground. And from that rubble, the hulking silhouettes of headcrabbed zombies rise, shambling and groaning.
They slough around with a gait that’s strangely familiar. Their feet drag, their bodies lurch, propelled by something unnatural in a weighty, ungainly rhythm. One stumbles into a small crater, rank water having pooled in that scarred earth, and gurgles wetly, but doesn’t manage to flail out of the water before it gurgles its last.
Gordon laughs, but he’s not certain why. It wasn’t that funny. (But, you know, it was a little funny.)
Unfortunately, that little laugh draws their attention. A beat passes. Heads turn to face him. Then a visceral, animalistic bleat rends the air, the sound of half a dozen mangled windpipes howling in unison. He swears.
“We’ve got company!” Gordon yells, yanking his SMG off his shoulders.
He expects them to charge at him, startled into action like a pack of bloodthirsty deer, to scramble up a few similes, but… they don’t. Instead, they shuffle. The allure of fresh prey on the wind doesn’t grant these zombies any finer, faster control over their bodies. In fact, they have a hard time just keeping on target, their pathing tangling up in circles and meandering eddies. They move as if the headcrabs’ little limbs struggle to pull all those strings in their brains, jerking them into motion without any kind of confidence.
That makes it pretty fuckin’ easy for the two of them to mow them down, starting with the closest and fanning outward as they chart their own meandering path through the remnants of this abandoned outpost. In fact, more dangerous might just be the outpost itself. The blasts have torn free the electric cabling above his head, and live, sparking wires dangle from the power lines, threatening to bite Gordon like so many snakes if he doesn’t watch his step.
From a distance, the zombies really aren’t so scary. Their screams he could do without, though. There’s a throaty desperation to it, even in death, and Gordon tries his best to kill them before they have a chance to let loose.
Sends shivers down his spine. And not the kind he’s gotten used to.
Against a wall, he spots a body, and initially doesn’t give it another thought. There are too many around here as it is, electrocuted or half-eaten or slumped in the corners like they’ve been thrown at the wall by a petulant child. Set dressing. But the wide splash of blood behind the dead man’s head gives Gordon pause. His head hangs forward, forehead crusted in reddish-brown, and when Gordon stops to bend down, tilt the man’s jaw back, he almost jumps when he sees the hole through his skull. It burrows into an empty, slick darkness.
The handgun resting near the man’s limp hand tells Gordon all he needs to know. “Jesus,” he mutters. Then he backs away, wiping his hands on his front. “That’s a little much, don’t you think?”
Benrey’s eyes shift under the shadow of his helmet. The only clue that he’s processing anything that’s going on is the slight purse of his lips as he scans the man on the ground.
“you killed this?”
“Benrey, you saw me walk over here. No, I didn’t kill this.”
Benrey approaches the body and squats down to get a closer look. He squints at the head, blown out like yolk through an egg with holes poked through the ends. “it’s got your filthy prints all over it… buddy. i’d know this modus operandus anywhere,” he says, his tone bizarrely playful.
“It’s just environmental storytelling!”
“yeah, it’s tellin’ me a story, alright,” Benrey grins at him. He pushes himself back up, and wipes his hands on his pants in an exaggerated fashion as he continues, “ol’ gordon freeman, pushed to the brink again. who knows where he’ll strike next on his… his deadly killing spree.”
Gordon rolls his eyes, hard, and moves on. Broken poles and gashes of filthy, knee-deep water carve his path into unwieldy pieces. Sheets of plywood and stray industrial tires kicked into the water make the latter problem easier to navigate. The former, however, not so much: live wires sway dangerously close to Gordon’s head when he attempts to scale them, and all the raw primate energy in the world can’t stop him from yelping and tumbling to the ground when a small wire brushes his arm. So the HEV suit isn’t all too resistant to electricity. He swears he can smell his beard burning. And hear Benrey chiding him.
“Would it make you happier if I just said I killed him?” he yells at Benrey, who hops from tire to tire behind him with an ease that makes Gordon’s blood pressure tick up.
“uh, no. killing is illegal, idiot.”
He turns to stare at Benrey, incredulous. His hands push back at his hair and forehead in utter exasperation. “You have killed so many people, bro!” he says, pitch jumping up an octave. “That is, like, all you’ve done! Is kill people! And get on my fucking nerves!”
Those crackling wires have even come down around a steel shipping container, making its painted walls sputter and burst with electric sparks. And, unfortunately, its open doors form the only tunnel to the other side of the outpost. To make matters worse, its interior is crammed with wooden crates, leaving only an uncomfortably tight thread of a path if he doesn’t want to be zapped half to death.
“what’s the matter with you,” Benrey huffs, a venomous little whine crawling in. “i fuckin’… i come lookin’ for you, carryin’ you through the whole game, and all you do is yell at me, call my meat small—”
Gordon suddenly yelps - the surprise made him flinch, grazing the electrified wall, and the wall bit back harder than he expected.
“I haven’t said anything about your meat!”
“why are you so mean?”
“Me? I’m mean?! Have you— ow!— listened to yourself lately?!”
Benrey shoves him on his way past. “i was just doin’ my job,” he bitches.
Gordon snarls, and tries to shove him back, but misses and stumbles over a crate, only to grab Benrey by the ankle on his way down. “What fucking job?! What do they even pay you to do? Drink soda and play Madden all day?!”
That earns him a few attempted kicks. He’s nothing if not stubborn, though, and clings on, doing his level best to whale on Benrey just the same.
“i did my job! i was all, boo hoo, i don’t wanna be the bad guy, but you made me be bad, and now i—”
He grunts as Gordon manages to surge forward and topple him to the ground, bringing a host of empty boxes with them. It’s satisfying in a way that little else has been.
“Shut the fuck up!” Gordon shouts. His eyes pop open wide with fury, and he shoves at Benrey’s chest. “I didn’t make you do anything! You were the bad guy because you are the bad guy!” Electric current roars around them, sparks arcing from bolt to bolt. “That’s how they programmed you! They programmed you to be a little fucking sociopath, I guess, because there needs to be a good guy and a bad guy! Like in every fucking video game since, since, since history!”
Benrey glares up at him, jaw set. Fueled by adrenaline, Gordon’s eyes dart from point to point on his face, scanning Benrey for a reaction before he has the chance to act on it. The glint of electricity in his eyes. The ugly sneer curling his lip. The faint scar that carves a path just under his left eye, across his cheekbone. How long has that been there?
“you’re so fuckin’ dumb,” Benrey laughs, but there’s no humor in it. Just a foul, dripping condescension. “you know why nobody else came lookin’ for you? huh? mister good boy?”
“I don’t know! Because Tommy’s not some kind of— some kind of eldritch god thing? I still don’t know how we got here, dude!” He shoves Benrey again. It feels good. “I don’t know fucking anything!”
The straps of Benrey’s vest creak as he wraps his fingers around them. He thinks about wrapping his fingers around Benrey’s neck just like this. Choking out an answer from him.
“it’s because they don't even like you,” Benrey says. “everybody thought you sucked so bad that they didn’t wanna invite you to the pizza party. they didn’t even wanna come look for you. they like the other guy better and they’re all best friends with him now and they’re all gonna go to jamba juice later and you don’t get to get anything.”
Gordon frowns and loosens his grip. “Back up a second. Who’s the other guy?”
“not even a smoothie,” Benrey hisses.
“You don’t— Stop trying to make me laugh! This is serious!” And he’s so mad at Benrey he could just kill him, besides!
If he does, though, then Benrey’s not gonna elaborate, and he’s gonna be left holding the bag. He can’t— he can’t handle that. And if there’s one thing that keeps him from walking away, it’s this: this infuriating puzzle box before him, answers only falling loose from his grip with enough shaking and chewing.
He needs to know. He needs to know why he can’t sleep. Why he can’t leave. Why he can’t take off the goddamn headset and go home.
But Benrey just bares his teeth in an approximation of a grin, bursts out with a loud approximation of a laugh, and hurls Gordon off of him with enough force to crush the crates around them. Gordon groans, suddenly winded. When he can hoist himself upright again, he chases after Benrey and bursts out the other side of the shipping container with a shout.
Then he stops.
Before him, the land ends in a swampy, oily muck that stretches out as far as the eye can see. It looks much the same as the filth he’d crawled through earlier, but an upturned skiff in the distance gives him the impression that this isn’t just another shallow puddle he can slip and slide across. And he doesn’t want to find out how deep it really is. Somebody else must have had the same thought, once upon a time, since a bridge crosses its outer edge, thin planks laid out in a curve that hugs the wall of the building beside him.
They creak under each step, and he hopes desperately that they won’t give out underneath him. The last thing he wants is for this shit to end up in his mouth. The bridge takes them into a small port of some kind, with posts for boats to dock at and a humming generator fueling strings of lights above and a gate lowered into the water at its mouth. And behind the gate…
“Holy shit, is that an airboat?!”
“dibs,” Benrey hollers, suddenly near.
Gordon elbows him in an attempt to shove him away. “I saw it first! I get dibs!”
It’s a clunky little boat underneath all the trappings: two pontoons, one seat, and a fan taller than Gordon himself mounted to the back. He kneels and runs a hand along the welded steel. It bobs gently in the water, which laps against the wood underfoot in a slow, steady rhythm. Whoever this belongs to, they don’t seem to be around; in fact, the entire dock is deserted. The generator hums for no one. Gordon frowns.
“Something’s not right,” he says. “I think there was supposed to be somebody here. Whoever’s boat this was. Look, there’s no key in the ignition…”
He stands again, but this time, he grips his crowbar in both hands. The hairs on the back of his neck stiffen with unease.
“And the radio’s on, too. Just like the last one.”
“think they got eaten?”
Gordon’s frown doesn’t shift as he faces Benrey. “What? No. Don’t be stupid.”
Benrey rolls his eyes. “like by a headcrap. idiot.”
“I don’t know, man. It just doesn’t feel right,” Gordon insists. As he speaks, he slowly moves around the enclosed port, lifting up errant papers by his fingertips as if he’s worried they might snap and bite him. They don’t tell him anything new, though.
“facts don’t care about your feelings.”
That gets Gordon to stare at him like he might a bug, crushed on the underside of his boot. “Don’t say shit like that. Jesus, did they train you on fucking 4chan?”
Actually, that might explain a few things. Like his fondness for meme-y speech and totally inscrutable humor. Gordon finds his heart sinking the longer he thinks about it. He knew Benrey sucked, okay, that was an incontrovertible fact, but it rings a lot different if Benrey sucks like that. And he doesn’t like that he cares so fucking much about it.
Benrey’s nose wrinkles. “what? what the fuck is that?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
That’s weirdly reassuring. Gordon laughs half-heartedly when Benrey mutters something about Black Mesa training, not fully paying attention. He fiddles with the radio dials, but much like the last, he can’t get a hold of anybody on the other side. And he can’t find any hints as to where the keys to the airboat might be. That had to have been what they came here for - the dock ends in nothing but bare concrete, and there’s an open ocean of filth waiting just outside. But nothing leaps out at him.
Until he turns the corner of a shallow alcove and something does leap out at him.
Gordon shouts - a blur smacks him in the face, claws at him, sinks its rotten teeth into his skin for a split second before he shoves it off -
But it lurches back to its feet faster than it should, a staggering humanoid with a headcrab mounted atop the head that moves with a grace unbecoming. Something spills out from inside it, a throaty howl. Something like… words.
It hurls itself at him again and tackles him to the ground. Small hands keep him pinned by the throat with an unearthly strength, tendons popping violently against its skin, and he chokes as the headcrab’s slender claws stab at his face. They miss, though. The body underneath yanks its head in jerky motions, over and over, just barely keeping its teeth out of reach.
His fingers scrabble instinctively at the zombie’s arms. Sweat beads on his forehead.
It moans in agony above him, spittle dripping from the headcrab’s gory maw, and Gordon hears, it, finally, the distorted terror of a woman’s voice struggling through blood and spit:
”Help… me.”
His eyes go wide. His fruitless struggle grinds to a halt.
And then she jerks. Once, twice. Each accompanied by a bang, an explosive roar. On the third, the zombie’s arms go limp, and she collapses to the side, twitching.
“makin’ me do all the work,” Benrey drawls above him, stepping into view.
It takes a moment for Gordon to find his voice. Emotions surge in his chest, an uncomfortable maelstrom of fear, relief, and blistering anger churning until he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
“You just— you just killed her!”
That earns him a flat look. “you weren’t mad about all the other ones. what crawled up gordon freeman’s metal panties this time?”
“I-I’m not even wearing those anymore, first of all! And like— Didn’t you hear that?”
“all i heard was you yelling. ‘oh, benrey, come save me, i forgot how to swing my… uhh… big bad crowbar.’” Benrey’s voice pitches up in mockery, and he places a delicate hand upon his cheek.
Gordon pushes himself to his feet, putting distance between himself and the still-twitching body beside him. “You are so full of shit, man,” he says. “There was a girl in there! She was…”
He trails off and looks down. Like this, slumped over itself, the zombie isn’t so much a woman as a vaguely-organic lump, any identifying features obscured by the slack jumpsuit and the slim, blackened headcrab stretched taut over her skull. Indistinguishable from all the others. The only offering of humanity is one of those small hands, tucked close to its chest. And clutched in it, fingers wrapped around like a rosary…
A key. With a yellowed plastic tag on the ring. Gordon plucks it gingerly from her fingers.
“She was talking,” he says quietly. “At least, that’s what it sounded like. Maybe I’m fuckin’ losing it.” Gordon glances at Benrey and feels a tingling embarrassment creep down his skull. “I guess I don’t know why I didn’t just… y’know.”
He mimes the swing of a golf club with his crowbar.
“gettin’ soft in your old age,” Benrey says, the corner of his mouth turning up. “or, uhh… benny’s been holding your hand too much. gotta let the baby bird leave the nest.”
Gordon rolls his eyes. The key fits snugly in the airboat’s ignition, he finds, after he climbs into the pilot’s seat. There’s a small issue, however: one seat. Two men. And Benrey just stands in place at the edge of the dock, eyes shadowed by his helmet.
He could turn the key, he thinks. Start up that fan and skedaddle, leaving Benrey behind. It would be so easy. But his hand hovers over it, suddenly uncertain. It’s not that he, like, needs Benrey to go along with him, much less wants him to - he could have handled that whole fucking situation by himself, thanks, no matter what Benrey’s insinuating - but some ineffable force makes him hesitate. Roots him in place. He can’t go, but he can’t stay, either.
After a moment, Gordon makes one of the stupider decisions in his life. “…You just gonna stand there?”
“what?”
“Come on, we don’t have all day. Sun’s shining, birds are chirping, and the water’s, uhh,” Gordon pauses to glance down at the oily green froth licking the edges of the boat, “the water’s fine.”
“oh. nice.” Benrey’s mental processes grind and whir to life once again, and the path of action they spit out is, apparently, to hop in the boat and sit his ass square on Gordon’s lap.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whaaat are you doing?” he sputters, as he tries to shove Benrey off.
“sittin’.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan!”
“wha— you told me to, bro!” Benrey whines.
He’s as immovable as if he were made of stone, and he’s about as heavy, Gordon thinks viciously. “The hell I did! Can’t you just, like, sit on the side or something? Hang onto a railing?”
“do i look like… fuckin’… harry popper to you? i’ll fall off. and then i’ll drown. and you’ll be sooo sad and sooo scared and—”
“Speak for yourself! Look, man, there’s only one seat on this thing, and there’s two of us, and, uh, I can’t steer the fucking boat like this! Something’s gotta give!” Gordon slaps at Benrey’s legs as if that will dissuade him, but it’s Benrey he’s talking about. Of course he doesn’t budge.
Instead, he just cranes his neck around. “benrey drive.”
“Absolutely not!”
“why do you have to be so annoying,” Benrey whines again, drawing out the last word into something more like annoying-uhhh. “you wanna sit on my lap? huh? lil’ boy?”
Gordon’s face turns an unpleasant shade of red. “No, I don’t, and—”
But Benrey’s not listening. He’s hopping off of Gordon’s lap instead, and yanking him up by the arm and manhandling him out of the way. Even with all this armor weighing him down, Benrey has a much easier time of it than Gordon wants him to. “you are so complicated,” he bitches.
With a firm tug on the back of the HEV suit - that stupid little band of armor around Gordon’s hips, just the right size and shape to be dragged around by, which seems insanely unnecessary as a design feature, in his opinion - Gordon topples backward into his lap. He yelps, an offended little “hey!”
“let’s gooo!”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Gordon snarls under his breath. That ugly flush spills down his shoulders and chest until he swears he’s going to boil alive in this suit, frustration and humiliation cooking him from the inside out.
He should have just left Benrey there, he thinks savagely. But at least he gets to be the one to drive. Gordon wouldn’t trust him with anything more complicated than a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. He turns the key with way too much force, and the fan behind them whirs and sputters, and then at last roars to life, turning the enclosed port into a howling wind tunnel. That burning feeling doesn’t subside, though. It only gets worse: Benrey wraps his arms around his waist, hanging on tight, and there’s hot breath at the back of his neck, and Gordon fucking floors it, hoping to God that if they blaze out of there fast enough, he’ll leave all those tumultuous thoughts and feelings behind.
The cold whip of air on his face helps. The whoops of excitement behind him don’t.
“I think we’ve got a problem on our hands, Judith.”
Judith pushes an errant strand of brown hair back from her face, eyes closed and tension obvious in the knotted lines of her forehead. She sighs, then meets Eli’s eyes again. “Tell me about it.”
He’s caught the good doctor in her office, where she’s been since he last spoke to her… oh, a good twelve hours ago. The clutter on her desk has taken a life of its own since then, it seems: papers multiplying, cups of water shuffling, a bright yellow stress ball having found a new home clenched tightly between her fingers. Eli can sympathize.
“Found something awful strange in all that data you sent me,” Eli says, glancing at the spreadsheets she’s working on herself. Judith’s spread of monitors pales in comparison to her little panopticon below, in the security room, but they do give it a good run for its money, with a dozen different applications and video feeds flickering in simultaneity. “I thought it might have been nothing, but the timing’s too good. Down to the millisecond.”
“Something strange? That should have just been busywork,” Judith frowns.
“You’d think… But something about those heat maps didn’t sit right with me.”
He takes the opportunity to lean on the edge of the desk, a corner free of paperwork, and sighs with relief. The hubbub with Louie had him hoofing it up and down the lab, and it wasn’t doing his bad leg any favors.
“We still don’t know how Gordon got here,” he says. “Well, ‘here’ in the temporal sense, of course, but in the physical, too. As far as I can tell, somebody just… snapped their fingers, and here he is, not a day older than he was when we lost him.” The description’s more literal than he’s letting on. “Whatever the cause, I figured a spatiotemporal event of that nature had to show up somewhere in our records. Lucky that you sent me all those crystal resonance frequencies when you did.”
Her eyes light up with a realization. Eli can’t help the way his easy smile widens.
“I’d suspected as much, myself,” she murmurs, “but I take it you found something more interesting than a correlation?”
Eli hums in agreement. “Oh yeah. Try three.”
“Three? You don’t mean…”
“Gordon’s not the only one who crossed over,” he confirms. Judith’s eyebrows furrow in disbelief. “Now, I could be wrong, but I’ve been poring over the Xen crystal data for hours, and the results don’t lie. There’s three identical peaks. And two of them are within milliseconds of each other, just before we learned that Gordon was here.”
Judith hunches over, a hand on her chin, deep in thought. “…You don’t think Gordon brought somebody with him? That man he’s with?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Barney’s been raising hell about it, last I heard…”
“That would leave the third signature,” she prompts.
“Yeah. Came about an hour after the first two.” Eli purses his lips. “In theory, that means there was a third crossover event, but we haven’t heard anything about anybody else popping into City 17. Just Gordon and his, uh, friend.”
Something hardens her face. It marks an abrupt transition from ‘Judith’, his friend and confidante, to ‘Dr. Mossman’, the stern, no-nonsense lead researcher for the Resistance. She straightens the sleeves of her white turtleneck before she says, “We need all eyes and ears on the ground. Anything even remotely suspicious, it comes to me. Comms, I need to get a hold of Comms, get a sitrep from every outpost—”
“Judith—”
“The Vortigaunts,” she says suddenly. “They felt something, didn’t they? Louie’s been moaning up and down the halls since lunch—”
“Dr. Mossman,” he interrupts, more firm this time. A hand on her shoulder helps. “Comms won’t be much help.”
“What? Why?”
A pause. There’s a storminess to Eli’s gaze as he says at last, “The outposts have been falling like flies. We don’t have anybody left to get in contact with.”
She matches it, although less with grief and more with indignance. “There’s nobody on the ground? Why was I not informed?”
“I thought you knew. But, uh, it seems like the whole chain of command’s gone to hell in a handbasket,” Eli says, laughing humorlessly. “We can’t get a hold of Gordon, Izzy and Barney are AWOL, the Combine’s taking down our transmission lines faster than we can put ‘em up…”
Dr. Mossman swears under her breath. “So what next? Do we just wait for our turn at the chopping block?”
“Well,” Eli starts, drawing it out. “You know, Alyx was tossing out some ideas. Said she was thinking about taking D0G out for a walk…”
“You can’t be serious.”
“As a heart attack,” he says dryly. “It’s not my first choice, but you know how she gets when she sinks her teeth into an idea. You could try talking her out of it?”
“Oh, no,” laughs Dr. Mossman, with a similar lack of humor. “The last thing she’d do is listen to me. Hell, I suppose if I encouraged her, she might leave well enough alone out of spite…”
Eli sighs. Judith’s given voice to the same concern that’s been running through his head, whether she knows it or not: What next? What can they do, other than sit on their thumbs and sweat? Admittedly, the last thing he wants is for his daughter to go running into open fire just to look for Gordon Freeman. But this is shaping up to be bigger than him - bigger than Alyx, bigger than any one of them alone. And Gordon might well be their only hope.
If he makes it back alive, anyway. Jury’s still out on that one.
“I can’t say for sure what our next move is,” Eli says. “Maybe we could run some drills as a precaution. If you feel the need. But right now, I’d say…” He scans her desk, taking in the multiple empty mugs, but no sign of other dishes. “You need to eat.”
“Eli, there’s no time.”
“We can make some. The paperwork’s still gonna be there when you get back. Come on, I’ll join you,” he insists.
She groans, but takes him up on the offer nonetheless.