Freeman's Flight

"Once again, I stress the extreme importance of the eradication of any and all opposition to our great movement. This 'free' man is no more than a criminal, a renegade scientist who now chooses to turn against his colleagues for his own, selfish purposes," preached the holographic billboard, cycling the prerecorded propaganda of the Combine regime and its human representative, Dr. Wallace Breen.

"However, our benefactors have requested that I assure you that justice will be swift, and that the rebellion against our great nation will be crushed without mercy, so that we may continue towards the next phase of human evolution," his voice echoed monotonously throughout the bullet scarred apartment block, as five ragged rebel recruits huddled closely on the fourth floor. Gunships passed overhead, shaking the fractured ceiling, and causing dust to rain down on their shoulders. Snow slowly fluttered down from the overcast night sky.

"It's fucking freezing, man, how far is the checkpoint?" complained a teenage soldier, tightly gripping his MP7 submachine gun.

"Relax, we've still got a while to go through this complex," the leader replied calmly.

The ceiling shook once more, small amounts of sheetrock pattering onto the worn, tiled floor. The windows that were left illuminated dimly with smeared grime.

"We have get through the courtyard past this next building." he pointed out on a folded, crumpled map. Everyone was jumpy, including himself. Reports of possible rebels in the area usually meant that the apartments would be congested with scanners.

"What about the reports we got about CP in the area?"

"We'll have to deal with them as they come. Let's go."

There was something about the heights that made City-17 terrifying and beautiful at the same time, being in the middle of November. Snow fell in weightless sheets, coating the causeways with a thin filament of ice that glistened in the moonlight. However, the rebels knew better than to relish in the serenity of the atmosphere. Improperly dressed for the freezing temperatures, and trigger-happy from their last skirmish in the subway tunnels, they moved eagerly towards the forest to the south to rendezvous with a rebel convoy scheduled to cross through at 0530 hours.

It was now three o' clock AM, and they had been scrambling through the stacked, egg-crate style apartment complexes for the last two hours. City 17 was enormous, and they were smack in the middle of downtown. The entire metropolis was more than sixty kilometers across, and a normal crossing would take a day or more. At the rate the group was going, however, the railroad checkpoint was only a few kilometers north of the apartment district, and reaching it would not take longer than another couple hours.

Passing through another door, they arrived at an adjacent hallway connecting to the outside through a demolished portion of the wall at the end. They quickly moved up and looked beyond to the building opposite. Trees were visible, standing tall behind the crumbling structures left after the battle which raged through the district, several months earlier. Civilians had fled to their homes to take shelter from prosecution after Gordon Freeman caused such uproar in the district that civil protection had decided to seal it off and cleanse the entire block. The underground canals that had provided citizens with safe passage out of the city had been discovered, and the rebellion was spurred before Eli Vance and his associates were ready to challenge the Combine. Riots broke out, citizens fled the city on foot, people were lined up along walls and executed, and RAD missiles full of head crabs were fired into apartment blocks to kill off any hiding civilians or rebels barricaded inside. The whole residential sector was in turmoil as rebels struggled to cling to their little gains during the confusion with stolen and improvised weapons. Combine demolition teams collapsed the tunnels leading out of the city, and gunships patrolled the sector constantly. To try and isolate the incidents from other sectors of the city, forcefields and mobile palisades were established at major intersections. However, it was too late. Revolution had begun, and nothing could restrain it.

There were virtually no civilians left in this sector. All had either escaped, joined the rebellion, or had been killed or captured, leaving residencies devoid of all life. It was easy to distinguish who had escaped and who didn't, as the suitcases and personal belongings of the unfortunate were scattered across their rooms. There were no bodies to be found, and there was no activity on the road either. Sectors such as this one were already deemed insignificant by civil protection, because the battles had already been fought, and the dead already collected. They knew that no one would dare take shelter in such a place, especially in the winter, and there was a constant danger of head crabs and structural instabilities. Just earlier, a part of the floor collapsed while the team was walking on it.

"There isn't anybody around, this place is so dead," one groaned.

"I heard they take the bodies to the Citadel, do experiments on 'em and shit."

"Shut it, people. We've got a few more to go before we reach the border. There should be a service tunnel in the security office of the building after this next one, which connects to the sewers under the road. We'll take the storm drains out into the reservoir," ordered the leader.

The man on his left set down his pack and removed an instrument that resembled a crank attached to a thick sheet of metal. He laid it on the ground and inserted a key into the front panel lock. A metallic ping rang out and the sheets of metal separated vertically, hanging off of the frame by springs. He grasped the handle and turned the wheel clockwise, slowly extending the sheets towards the next building. It cranked loudly in the night, echoing throughout the empty district. This device was used to deploy a makeshift bridge that could be used to cross from building to building on the same side of the street. The distance was usually too far and too dangerous to attempt a jump, since a fall would usually result in death at this height. It was always risky, however, because it could only support one adult at a time.

The lighter woman set out first, carefully balancing herself on the beam and slowly shuffling outward, towards the window of the other apartment. The bridge was teetering feebly on the outcrop, and they typically had a minute before the ledge crumbled away. She gripped the sill with both hands and pulled without success. Cracks were visible across the concrete outcrop below the window frame, and seemed willing to widen and plunge the woman to her death at any moment. She struggled with the window, yanking at it with all of her might, but it was stuck.

"Hurry up!" hissed the engineer, desperately pressing his weight on the crank.

"It's not budging!" she began to panic, removing a crowbar from her pack. She wedged the tool under the window frame and jiggled at it, without success.

"Break it!" barked the leader, readying his revolver. City Scanners were sure to hear this, he thought. She swung the crowbar and loudly shattered the window, hopping inside and bolting the clamps for the bridge over the inside of the frame. Once everybody had gotten safely to the other side, the engineer began to unclamp the bridge and prepared to pack it up.

Suddenly, a faint, electronic whirring was heard further down the hall. Everyone stayed absolutely still except for the engineer, still fiddling with the machine.

"What the fuck are you doing?" yelled the teenager.

"I need to pack this up!"

"Shut the fuck up and dump it out the window, now!" the leader hissed.

The engineer quickly pushed the half retracted mechanism out of the broken window. Its crash echoed throughout the building, as it hit the street, and everybody tensed for battle. Spotlights illuminated the end of the hallway, as the scanners moved to investigate.

"Hide!" shouted the leader, running into the adjacent room and flattened against the wall behind the door. People spread out across the two rooms connected to the hallway, hiding under tables and beds, and inside closets.

The silence was deafening, as thirty seconds passed without a sound emerging from the corridor. Then a sharp, Gaussian tweet cried out, shattering the lulled sense of isolation. Everyone else was too green to understand scanner language except the leader, and he knew with a cold certainty that the scanners had found where the window broke and the bridge was laid. Rapid clicks of shutters were heard inside the main passage, as the scanners took pictures and uploaded them directly to the Citadel. Maybe, by chance, they hadn't found the bridge, he hoped. Pushing it out of the window, however only traded one problem for another, as the scanners now knew for sure that he and his party were in this building.

A thought nagged at the back of his mind: scanners would send the data to the citadel any minute now, and the Advisors would order an immediate protection team to investigate the disturbance. Advisors didn't think about anything for more than four milliseconds, because of the emotionless multiprocessing power of their brains. They filtered and responded to any information or surveillance picked up anywhere in City 17, and that was a lot. About two hundred exabytes of information passed through the Advisors per day, and they reacted almost instantaneously to it. If civil protection and Overwatch reacted at even a tenth of that speed, the rebellion would have been crushed the minute it started. So, rebels learned how to play the system, and to use the vice-like grip the Citadel had on City 17 to their advantage. Electronics were easy to disassemble and manipulate, and there was always the human error to rely on. Even if the Advisors never made mistakes, civil protection did. Lately, they'd made a habit of second guessing Advisors' orders out of self-preservation and other nuisances. Scanners frequently reported human activity in places that had been deserted for months, and the Advisors coldly led the Metrocops on a goose chase that caused much frustration. Speculation existed that the Advisors were becoming increasingly paranoid, intent on quelling the revolt as soon as possible, and that was getting worried about Freeman. There were rumors that he actually teleported into Breen's office one day, and attacked him.

They waited in the darkness for five minutes, fifteen, while scanners searched through the rooms, looking for any signs of a human presence. The leader maintained his composure, hugging the wall as closely as he could. If the scanners were particularly thorough, then they'd most likely find him, but scanners were programmed to never scan a room twice, which is why they travelled in groups. Usually if one scanner missed something, another would catch it. That's why hiding behind the door was very logical, because scanners would enter a room and then move on to the next without going back through the same door. It was also intended in the design of the buildings that there were at least two ways into an apartment, to prevent civilians from barricading themselves in too well. However, it was hardly the most popular way to hide from surveillance, because you had to stand up straight, perfectly still, controlling your breathing, and the scanners would pass right in front of your face when they entered the doorway. Hiding under a table or bed is much more psychologically merciful, because you can breathe normally for the most part. However, after a while, people break, and set the district on alert. Or, they sneeze.

Another minute passed, and the scanners had begun to finish their cycle of the immediate area, after which they would inspect the rest of the building, floor by floor. The leader began to relax, turning on the safety of his .357 Magnum Revolver. If they had been detected, he would have had to react with split-second timing. He stayed still for a while longer, and then shifted over to the connecting door to the second room, peering over the door frame. His blood froze at what he saw. The teenager was pinned against the wall, dust coating his head and chest and a scanner was staring him straight in the face. It didn't recognize him as a rebel yet, because his face was camouflaged by the cracked plaster. The scanner knew that something was there, something alive. Although scanners used relatively primitive technology to determine whether a subject was human or not, they usually didn't have to, since all of their data was continuously uploaded to the Citadel's central server. The Advisors would notice a human on the video feed almost as soon as the scanners would detect it for themselves. It was just the team's luck that it was very late and that they were in an unremarkable part of town.

The scanner seemed to have lost interest, beginning to whir again as if it was ready to float somewhere else. But suddenly, the boy let out a loud sneeze. An ultrasonic alarm called out and a light flashed in the teen's face, blinding him for several seconds. Camera shutters flicked at maximum speed and immediately sent a priority alert to the Citadel and the other scanners in the proximity. The teenager dropped to the floor, covering his eyes, as the leader lashed out from his hiding place with a crowbar and smashed the scanner apart.

"Weapons free!" barked the leader, grabbing the boy by the collar of his jacket, "Get up, kid! We are leaving!"

Shots exploded inside the hallway, as the startled sirens of scanners rang through the still air. Civil protection would be here any minute, and they had to move now. He dashed over to the engineer and reached into his bag, grabbing three packs of plastic explosive.

"What are you doing?" exclaimed the woman as she saw him charge down the hall and set the explosive on the stairwell.

"We are going to blow up the staircase so that CP believes we have barricaded ourselves up here! Now, everybody prepare a hook and rope to rappel down the wall, into the canal!"

It may have delayed a bunch of Metrocops, but the leader knew that they had now been seriously compromised and that Overwatch would send in combat vehicles. As if on cue, tires screeched to a halt on the main road, doors slammed, radios crackled, and the crash of a gate being broken down resonated from downstairs. The leader and his team positioned themselves near the windows running parallel with the canal below, and began rappelling down the structure. He waited another few seconds and squeezed the detonator. A muffled report rippled through the construction as the stairway collapsed with eight CP officers on it. He glanced down, between his legs after he hopped out onto the wall. It was a long way down, but it looked like they could make it in time to escape Overwatch's grasp.

Just as he finished the thought, several things happened extremely quickly, beginning with a tremor from inside the complex. At first the squad leader thought it was just an aftershock from blowing up the staircase, but then another violent shake rattled the whole structure. He heard a cry to his left as the engineer lost his grip on the rope and fell to his death, impaling himself on an antenna jutting out of the partition. Immediately, he understood what was happening. Overwatch was demolishing the building with mobile artillery, firing shells at the foundations in an attempt to knock the entire fourth floor down. He quickly shot another look down at the canal, more than sixty feet below. It didn't matter; they'd have to jump for it.

"Push off the roof and dive into the canal, now!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. The teenager looked back at him with fearful eyes, but hadn't seemed to understand the order.

"What?" the young boy cried out, urgently.

"I said, jump into the – ," he was cut off as the entire world exploded with the force of a million tons. Everything slowed to a crawl, as the sonic boom deafened him, and he watched as the wall in front of him cracked and expanded, flames shooting up from the canyons like lava. An inferno engulfed his whole body, raking his arms and legs with fiery swords and sending superheated air into his eyes and throat. The rope was ripped out of his grasp, disintegrating in what seemed to be a solar flare erupting from the crumbling rock. For a moment, he was suspended in midair, losing all sense of gravity. Then the force of the explosion hit him, as if it were held back by its own weight, ripping apart his internal organs and stripping his cheeks from his face. It tossed him outward, into the air, as if he were a ragdoll. And in a flailing, spinning, burning heap of flesh, he plunged from the sky like a rock. Drifting in and out of consciousness in that never-ending descent, he fell indefinitely towards oblivion. And then, the water hit him like a pan, reverberating through his bones as each of his nerves were jolted awake. He slowly sunk to the bottom, with his vision and hearing returning in restrained slivers. The charred remains of his teammates splashed above him, along with masses of molten debris. Alarms rang in his brain as the pain resurged into his consciousness and a clear rediscovery of his surroundings was thrust rudely into mind. Quickly, the pain dulled and his strength returned as an electronic voice soothed him with the words "morphine administered".

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