The scientist's eyelids flickered open. He groaned and stood up shakily. His sinuses ached like hell, and his movements were clumsy and jerky. Inter-dimensional travel wasn't healthy. He surveyed the wreckage of the million dollar Anti-Mass Spectrometer with piercing green eyes, shivering uncontrollably despite the climate-controlled hazard suit that had probably just saved his life. The air around him trembled with electricity, and the shrieking alarm sounds drilled into his battered skull. He turned and staggered to the blast doors at the entrance to the lab, registering in his dazed state the corpse of one of the two technicians who had opened the doors for him before the experiment. He managed to force his way through the second, smaller door to the corridor beyond, and almost tripped over the second technician who was crouched over a motionless security officer in a dark pool of blood.
The green-eyed scientist shuddered and started running, climbing over destroyed banks of computer monitors and stepping over more corpses, and as he neared the elevator he was thrown flat on his back by a sudden violent explosion as some machinery shorted out ahead of him. His heart was going ten to the dozen as he rolled back onto his feet.
He jumped into the elevator and jabbed at the button. When it reached the next level without exploding, he actually laughed. Dr. Eli Vance looked up from the guy slumped against the wall with an almost comical look of surprise.
"Gordon! You're alive! Thank God for that hazard suit." He glanced down at his colleague again, and continued: "I'm afraid to move him and all our phones are out. Please, get to the surface and let someone know we're trapped down here. I'll get the door for you."
Gordon Freeman followed him to the control room door and waited as Eli stared into the retinal scanner. He ran through without another word, flinching as a spark from the Spectrometer jumped through the observation window and shattered the thick glass of the door opposite. Gordon slid across the room on his stomach, fearing further lightning strikes. As he ducked through the destroyed door, he heard a series of explosions from behind him as more machines blew.
Running down this next corridor, a new explosion put him on edge. The laser containment pipes had broken in a couple of places and burning red light had just cut straight through another bank of computers. Gordon ducked under the beams and snatched up a crowbar. He smashed his way through another door then pressed the button for the second elevator. He was knocked back by a wall of air as the elevator itself crashed down the shaft in front of him, trailing steel cables and the screams of its passengers as it went. He stepped up to the empty doorway and spotted a maintenance access ladder extending up the wall. Without a moment's pause, Gordon gripped a rung and started climbing.
He stepped through the doors at the top of the ladder and met a panicked security guard.
"Hey, Dr. Freeman. I don't know what's going on, but fuck my life are these aliens scary." Gordon looked at a twisted corpse on the floor, with bullet holes in its chest, ribs growing outside its skin, and what looked like a raw chicken on its head. Most disturbingly, it was wearing a blue shirt, striped tie, beige slacks and a lab coat. Suddenly, the guard let out a strangled yelp and fired off seven or eight shots in quick succession as another mutated scientist lurched round the corner. It collapsed against the wall gurgling, and clutched the oozing yellow bullet holes in its chest with a huge clawed hand.
Gordon felt strangely numb inside, as if he was dreaming. The possibility of a Resonance Cascade was so slim it was practically a fairy tale notion, but here he was standing in the middle of one. His legs felt shaky again and he could feel suppressed shivers running down his spine.
Without looking at the security guard, he continued to the front desk. He ran into another pair of zombie-chicken things round the corner and reacted without thinking. He heard a savage yell as his crowbar ripped through flesh and shattered bones, and realised after wrenching his newly discovered weapon out of the skull of the second zombie that the yell had come from him.
He reached the destroyed blast doors to the transit system slightly in awe of this new, violent Gordon Freeman, but quickly sobered up when he ducked through the half closed doors to find the walkway utterly destroyed, with a terrified scientist clinging onto the railings.
"Stay back, Gordon!" the scientist choked out, then his grip failed and he tumbled screaming into the dark depths of the Sector C station cavern. Gordon felt sick and angry. This was all his fault.
He wheeled about and ran back into the Sector. He quickly established that the door to the control facilities was immovable, and the corridor to Sector B was blocked off by debris. The computer at the front desk was refusing to switch on, and the Blackberry he found on the dead scientist in the locker room told him their internet servers were down and they were so deep underground that there wasn't even coverage for 911 calls. On the edge of panic, Gordon paced around the reception area and tried not to look at the corpse on the floor and the gouts of blood splattered up the walls.