Chapter 1 - A City Asunder
It was cold. The sun was setting and there was frost in the air. Chell had passed several destroyed vehicles and had seen what she thought to be human remains at one time. She felt uneasy. The large column of smoke that originated somewhere ahead was drawing closer,
and she wasn't too sure she wanted to know what caused it.
"Just over the hill, keep walking."
Now that there was no voice present telling her to "keep testing" she found that she needed to have prolonged, mute conversations with herself to keep the voices in her head at bay. She was immensely tired. The cold and hunger was wearing her down. Regardless, she knew that there had to be something meaningful beyond the hill ahead. If there wasn't, she would probably die of exposure come nightfall.
What she saw when she reached the top brought her to a standstill.
The scattered remains of a City stood before her. A crater so large she could barely see the other side loomed in the middle of suburban City 17. It was in ruins. Chell hoped its residents got out before whatever tragedy struck here destroyed the city. Something was lying in a heap a couple of meters ahead.
"Was that... alive, once?"
As she approached the creature that looked half-bug, half-robot she wondered how anything so tall could ever have lived in an urban environment. Then she saw the gun mounted underneath the beast, and she knew the beast wasn't just a casualty in the tragedy that struck City 17. This was the scene of a battle.
She noted other remnants too. Shell casings littered the street, and she saw the body of an armoured man wearing a mask lying in the rubble. Memories of aperture came flooding back.
This looked very much like what Wheatley did to the Laboratory, nearly killing Chell and GlaDos less than 24 hours ago. If she didn't know that Wheatley was now a floating derelict in the moon's orbit she might have thought she never left the facility.
But this was different, at Aperture everything was precise, measured, clean and always served a scientific purpose. Everything was a test. This was Chaos. Destruction seemed like the only objective here. This was not the work of GlaDos or Wheatley.
A noise startled her. She spun around to see the silhouette of a man appear down the street. The sun was setting fast and in the fading twilight he was just a mirage. For a moment her heart leapt.
"Someone made it, I'm not alone here!"
Then she noticed his odd disposition. His head seemed too large for his body, and he had an odd limp. He came closer. She could see that he was severely injured, in fact she couldn't believe he was walking at all. And his head. His head seemed grotesquely deformed, like a cancerous growth had enveloped his face.
When he was less than ten feet away, the growth moved. It lifted its crab-like legs from his neck, revealing a grisly sight where the man's face should be. The zombie charged.
At first she couldn't believe she didn't notice his hands. Unnaturally long fingers, stripped of flesh and reaching out to her. Chell found that she was already running. This was unlike anything she had ever faced. No solution, no portal gun, no exit. Animal instinct took over as she stumbled through the debris. With her heart hammering, she turned a corner, but found only a dead end.
"No no no NO! Not after all I've been through! There has to be a solution, an exit!"
But this was not a test chamber, and she was trapped. She had survived it all, just to die at the hands of a dead man.
"No choice, I'll have to fight!"
The zombie was almost on top of her. When he came into reach, she swung and punched at his chest, attempting to knock him over. But her arm sunk into his rotten flesh up to the elbow.
Long fingers locked around her throat and squeezed shut. She couldn't have screamed if she wanted to.
"Ironic." she thought. "Starved for the least bit of human interaction, desperately seeking someone, anyone… and the first touch I experience is that of murder."
She fought to draw a breath, even broke a finger or two, but a dead man feels no pain, her vision blurred, then color faded and as her world turned to black, she heard a pop.