Hello, dear readers!
Thank you for your patience. This one took me a bit longer, even with me splitting the Ravenholm chapter into two parts. I hope you like it! Like seriously! Please let me know what you think, good or bad. I just figured out that I can actually reply to comments people make! So that's nifty!
I was trying to really set a clear stage for Ravenholm, and make it as tense as possible. I'm learning so much about writing from doing this project, by the way. It has been extraordinarily fruitful for me. That's my wink wink that I'm not going away, like I've said before.
Anyway, enjoy the first part of Gordon and Alyx's first date in Ravenholm! Will the power of their awkwardly emerging-turtle love overcome the twisted pandemonium of a Romanian heavy metal album cover? Maybe! Just maybe! But you don't find that out in this chapter! This chapter is two-thirds stage setting for Ravenholm, just as fair warning.
Hopefully the next chapter will not take as long, as I already have things more clearly worked out in my head.
Cheers!
"We Don't Go to Ravenholm,"
(part one)
Dr. Eli Vance.
The old photograph of him, with his wife and daughter, lays buried, beneath dust and rubble, in the raided labs of Black Mesa East.
The photo was taken in the summer of 2004: Eli fills the top right corner of the frame, more than a head taller than his wife Azian. His hair is rich and black. His whole face is handsome and put-together, his skin healthy and clean, without a wrinkle, except for his broad, full-lipped smile.
Another photo was taken of Eli Vance on December 23rd of 2025, around five in the morning. It was a military mug shot. Eli's right eye is black and bulging, his nose is bleeding, his face harrowed with wrinkles, his hair all gray and white, with spatters of dark red.
This was how Eli looked an hour after his personal surrender to the Combine. He, Mossman, and sixty-five rebels had endured about forty-eight hours of brutal siege, holding out in several linked laboratories on the sixth floor of Black Mesa East. They were only one of five other such besieged pockets, which continued to resist the Combine after Eli's surrender.
Black Mesa East: population of 1,023 (95, or 9%, of those were Vortigaunts). 218 (or, 21%) were cornered, but still fighting. 145 (14%) had managed to escape in the countryside due to a brief break in the Combine's lines. 32 (3%) were kept alive in the custody of the Combine.
628 were dead: 61%.
The Combine officers wanted Eli to tell the remaining rebels to stand down. Eli refused, saying only, "They're horribly disciplined. They won't listen to me." The Combine exerted a number of creative and physically persuasive arguments upon Eli, but he did not change his answer.
December 24th, 2025, 7:45 AM. Dr. Eli Vance was in a plain, dark, metal interrogation room, handcuffed to a table that was bolted to the floor. His right eye was too swollen to see, and green and purple bruises had developed all around his face and neck. His nose looked as though it had been permanently knocked out of shape. Several of his teeth were missing. He had not showered in days. It was a miracle his prosthetic leg was not broken, though one of the rods was dented. His head and face were roughly shaven with dried nicks of blood leftover, and he was now, for the first time in years, dressed in standard issue scrubs, far too thin against the lurking cold of the room. His scrubs were spray painted with yellow stripes, to show he was a prisoner.
He stared silently into the opposite wall, at the locked door.
The door opened with a creak.
In stepped Wallace Breen.
He looked just as he did on the television. Snowy hair, pleasantly aged yet strong face, cleanly, dressed in a simple gray-green suit over a black turtleneck sweater against the oncoming Romanian winter. He walked with a slight limp, which he was obviously working to cover up; but it did not escape Eli's notice.
Breen sat down in a chair opposite Eli. He was accompanied by two white uniformed Combine guards, faces hidden behind their gas masks. They seemed unnaturally rigid for human beings. They both held long, black stun batons. They positioned themselves in the two corners behind Eli.
"I would apologize," Breen began, almost solemnly, "but the last time I did that, you tried to strangle me."
"I guess we're even now," Eli croaked.
"Sarcasm does not become you," Breen replied. He knit his hands together on the table, and looked Eli directly in the eyes. He smiled slightly. "Those guards are highly specialized. I edited their Wernicke's areas: they can hear sounds, but cannot put them together into language. Scream, and they'll get agitated, but otherwise you may speak freely. I had all cameras unplugged, too…"
"That's disgusting, Wallace," Eli breathed.
"The cameras?"
"You know that I mean these two, poor boys behind me."
"They volunteered for the procedure," Breen said dismissively. "And they're both over twenty-one. You think I would operate on an adolescent brain?"
Eli was silent for a moment. Then, "I already said all that I have to say to you, sixteen years ago. This conversation is on you, Wallace. What do you want?"
Breen smiled again. "It's been so long; I am honestly interested in how you are doing, Eli."
Eli said nothing. A little trickle of blood had finally found its way out of his nose, and was getting caught on his graying, bristly mustache.
"How do you think your 'revolution' is going?" Breen continued, with infuriating casualty, as though they were having lunch at a bistro. "You see, I remember exactly what you said sixteen years ago, when you resorted to violence against me, instead of reason: 'I will make the revolution, Wallace. We will burn you to ash.' So tell me, Eli: how is that going for you?"
Eli said nothing. His pupils were trained directly on Breen, refusing to look away for a second.
"Because I think it's going rather poorly," Breen finished.
Eli was silent as a stone.
Breen continued, businesslike: "I want your cooperation, Eli, just as I did before. You have refused to tell your flock to stand down - I suspect, because you'd rather all of humanity perish, rather than accept their new conditions for existence. In any case, I have it on, albeit, questionable authority, that you can yet be reasoned with. So here we are."
Eli's eyes were dark. He finally rasped, "You will have to kill me, Wallace."
"No, actually, I won't," Breen said, irritated again. "I mean, really, Eli: they're standing right behind you," and he gestured derisively towards the guards. "I don't have to kill any of my opponents anymore. I can just edit them. You can't very well run a revolution without your Wernicke's area, can you? Humans can't do much of anything without language. 'Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' That's what they say God did to the builders of Babel; it was an awful shame. But, finally, globalization has been reversing God's judgement, and I intend to finish the process. 'Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language…and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' Isn't that marvelous? You have to admit that's marvelous, or you're not human! We have to become one as a species, Eli. We need one language, one species, one culture, and nothing will be restrained from us -"
"You're a lunatic," Eli interjected softly.
"Oh, come on, Eli," Breen snapped. "You're one to talk. Really! What do you think you've been doing these past sixteen years? The same thing as me: breaking down the language barriers, cultural barriers, hygienic and moral superstitions of your acolytes - you had no choice! You had no chance to 'burn me to ash,' unless you implicitly adopted my own philosophy! I've won the argument! And even after sixteen years you still can't see it? You can't see that humanity has one option left - to combine. Do I have to spell this out for you? Have you learned nothing?"
Eli narrowed his eyes. Breen was getting exasperated. Eli clung to that fact: Breen felt threatened, angry, desperate - yes, that was the case. It had to be. His arguments were the babblings of a desperate man - don't listen to them - he could not let Breen win, he could not let Breen into his head -
"Look around you, Eli," Breen continued, struggling to remain measured. "Look at what you've done, 'kicking against the pricks.' How many poor, pathetic souls have you lured away from the cities, to huddle underground and slave away in the service of your resentment? Do you know how difficult it has been to initiate the progress our species needs to survive, simply because your movement's very existence drags morale down, like a screaming child on a car trip? You give all these people the imbecilic hope that they can somehow beat the Combine, and all the while you're doing the very same thing I'm doing - if your fanatics were not so eager to throw themselves into my soldiers' gunfire, I would have a thousand more trained recruits purged of culture and superstition! You just handed them over to me, but you just had to make them hate me, you proffered me this gift and then threw it in the fire - you spiteful -! All you've done is make the whole process more painful! All you've done is create more opportunities for soldiers and civilians to die, when they could have been halfway to salvation by now! Why can't you see that? You've had sixteen bloody years and you haven't learned a goddamn thing!"
Breen was beginning to rave. His face was growing beet red, and a little fleck of saliva landed on the table between them.
Eli, struggling not to listen to Breen, said, with a hint of malice, "Gordon's back, you know."
Breen slammed his fist on the metal table.
He was silent. Then he recomposed himself, yet again; he looked more frustrated with himself than with Eli.
After a few more moments, he said, "I am well aware. We are tracking him right now. We know he is -"
"- in Ravenholm," Eli finished. "And he'll survive it."
"I highly doubt that. Even we don't go to Ravenholm."
"We are talking about the same Gordon Freeman, right?" Eli asked, almost laughing. He was beginning to enjoy himself, while Breen was growing proportionally discontent.
"Oh, you mean that Gordon Freeman?" Breen replied with venomous sarcasm. "The ponytailed asocial maladjusted Aspie, who nearly lost his bloody mind when we had a surprise fire drill? You're talking about him, right?"
"No, in fact," Eli replied, almost sly. "I mean the Gordon Freeman who single-handedly survived the United States Marine Corps, and an alien ecosystem, and blew up your old rocket field for fun."
"Oh! I see. Well, I'm sorry to tell burst your bubble, but there is no way in heaven or hell that Gordon Freeman survived the Resonance Cascade." Breen readjusted himself in his seat. "Your "Free Man," your messianic terrorist, is some sort of bizarre Vortigaunt trick, and it's working more than I'd like to admit -"
"Take it from me, Wallace," Eli interrupted. "It's not a trick. It's him."
Breen's look grew dark.
"If that's true," he said, almost growling now, "then you know, as well as I, that humanity has a much worse problem than the Combine."
Eli simply smiled.
"What," Breen retorted, "you think he's on your side?" But after a few more moments, Breen's eyes widened with realization. "Wait - your look…why, you really do think that!"
And Breen began laughing.
Eli had no idea what was so funny. He wondered if Breen had finally finished going insane.
"You never could - oh heavens -" Breen began, his aged chest heaving from the strain of his laughter, "- you never did...you couldn't…haha! - You never could factor infinity into your work, haha, you never could handle paradox, you really haven't learned anything, anything at all! Oh heavens…Ah Eli -!" Breen suddenly exclaimed. Eli refocused his attention. Breen's expression was heartbreaking. A slight smile, barely managing to lift underneath a burden no one man could ever shoulder alone - suddenly, before Eli, was Wallace Breen from Black Mesa: old Wallace, pretentious, eloquent, and unbearably brilliant, charmingly avaricious, successfully ambitious…old Wallace Breen, the best of them, the best of Black Mesa, and everyone knew it. Wallace Breen's expression was of such longing, as he said to Eli Vance, "Those were the days, weren't they…? Weren't they…"
He sighed deeply and looked down for a moment.
"Well, it hardly matters now," Breen said. "I knew you would not tell me anything. I suppose I simply wanted to…have a rational discussion, for old time's sake. Hopeless romantic that I am, haha! Ah…"
"Why are you laughing?" Eli asked quietly.
"The joke is on you, so sorry," Breen said, surprisingly irritable again. "You always liked Schrödinger, precisely because he didn't believe in paradox. He thought his cat experiment was a good reductio ad absurdum of quantum theory; too bad for him, absurdity is precisely what is at the very bottom of everything…from our perspective, of course. It wouldn't be absurd to a god, I suppose…"
"Wallace, Gordon is obviously on my side..."
"Oh, indeed! Indeed he is! Ha! You're an imbecile sometimes, you know that? The mathematics is sound - you know it as well as I, don't you? You ran the calculations first, remember? But reality is not matching up with the theory…"
"You're not…" Eli started. "You're talking about Ripley's conjecture? When I ran numbers on Gordon's resume? That was a joke, Wallace! You were laughing with me, it was numerology for quantum physicists! What are you talking about?"
"Did you know," Breen interrupted, as though he couldn't hear Eli, "there were some ancient Greeks who saw numbers as divine: the Pythagoreans - they believed that everything could be expressed as numbers, that the square root of two must be another number, something between one and two: maybe 6/5? Or 61/5? Or 611/5? But it can't be expressed as a number - not really. It can only be roughly approximated, merely indicated by symbols – 1.41421356 … What a shock for them…"
"You've lost your mind," Eli stammered. "Gordon's not a Ripley Point - that stuff is complete nonsense, Wallace…"
"Oh, I hope to the starry heavens you're right, Eli. I sincerely do. But I tell you: if that really is Gordon Freeman, then he is a Ripley Point. He's Schrödinger's cat. He's...well, he's a problem, don't you know? Ha ha...
"I think I'm done with you Dr. Vance. You'll be taken to Nova Prospekt for assimilation. I'll make a note to alter your Wernicke's area."
And Breen laughed coldly as he left, his old voice echoing in Eli's disbelieving ears.
Three days before: at the beginning of the siege on Black Mesa East.
Alyx and Gordon were twenty minutes down the passage to Ravenholm. It was fifty-five minutes since they left the storage room. Those intermittent thirty-five minutes had been spent seizing supplies: both medical and practical. Alyx's bullet wounds desperately needed Vortigaunt blood, and they both needed food and water - preparation for the unclear journey ahead of them.
It was chaos throughout Black Mesa East - as good as overrun, so far as Gordon was concerned. And concerned he certainly was.
Gordon returned from a short reconnaissance down a dark staircase. Alyx was slumped tiredly against an earthy wall, trying not to move her healing leg.
"The bottom is flooded about a foot high," Gordon Freeman reported. "It's tapped into an underground stream of some kind."
"You'll have to carry me," concluded Alyx, smiling slightly.
Without speaking, Gordon stooped down, and reached his arms under her knees and back, like a Prince about to sweep her off her feet.
"Um, Gordon…"
He strained and groaned for a moment, heaving up her deceptively slender frame.
"Well, okay…" she said.
"What?" Gordon breathed.
"I'd probably…be easier to carry on your back."
"Oh, yeah," and he rather promptly laid her back down. Then, crouching, he proffered his back and neck, which Alyx draped herself across. Gordon stood up, looping his arms around her legs, trying to be gentle with her bandages. Nevertheless, she squeezed her wrists in pain.
"Sorry," Gordon said.
"Mnit's fine…"
He began crossing the subterranean stream.
Gordon turned suddenly, like a dog perking up its ears. The water sloshed around his ankles, and the splash echoed down the hall. He was looking back from where they came.
"What is it?" Alyx asked.
"Thought I heard someone. Maybe someone decided to follow us after all..."
Alyx said nothing. This was the third time he'd hoped against hope - it was no use comforting him. She only prayed he wouldn't go rushing back to check.
Gordon had attempted to start an evacuation, through the Ravenholm passage. While Alyx had administered her own Vortigaunt shot, he had guarded the infirmary doorway with a stolen machine gun and pistol, all the while crying, "Ravenholm! Passage to Ravenholm! We're escaping through Ravenholm!" But not one of his fellow humans or Vortigaunts heeded him.
He would seize the shirts of retreating soldiers, and beg them, "There's passage through Ravenholm!"
One replied, "We know! We know!"
"Aren't you coming then?"
"We don't go to Ravenholm!"
And they left Gordon speechless, in the unventilated fog of gun-smoke.
"Mejor muerte segura que Ravenholm!" someone else added, as they passed.
"Gordon," Alyx had groaned. "We need to move."
Gordon hadn't answered.
"Gordon! Please!"
Nous avons déjà choisi.
He looked away from the fleeing rebels, from their scared faces, and met Alyx's pleading eyes. And it flooded back to him, much to his embarrassment as a scientist: the kiss -
Not the time to think about it. Not the time, for heaven's sake…
A hot fog was filling up the right side of his brain - yes, the right side of his scalp actually felt warm: all through his brow and forehead, too - there was no reaction from his groin, of course, and no sweat, either - the citadel was doing its job – but the fog was so thick...
There she was, she was waiting - his soul was reaching out towards her - don't think about it, we have work to do, c'mon...
Ten minutes down the passage, Gordon and Alyx had crawled underneath a heavy garage-style door. Then, they had made their way down a pitch-black corridor, with frequent stops for Alyx, so the Vortigaunt blood didn't get too excited in her veins. Finally, they had reached the stone staircase, with a red stop sign hung above it, and a haphazard blockade of wooden, domestic furniture, like an exploded antique shop.
"Where did all this come from?" Gordon asked, unsure if Alyx would answer. But she did: "From Ravenholm," she said. And Gordon had to infer, They set up a blockade on their way out…they used furniture from Ravenholm to…seal something in…? Gordon wanted to ask more, of course, but Alyx's leg wounds were worse than Gordon's had been - he suspected there was damage to her bones, and the Vortigaunt healing required more from her.
Gordon had set her gently against a wall, removing the gravity gun from her back. Then, taking aim at the blockade of furniture -
The gun screeched, and an entire hutch was dragged violently from the pile, snapping one of its legs against the stone wall. It halted right before the gun, weightless in its grip.
Gordon oriented it back from where they had come -
Za-BANG.
A bolt of lightning, and the hutch flew like a cannonball - into the far wall, exploding into splinters. The sound echoed back and forth through the hall.
Screeeeuch….scrape, scratch….Za-BANG.
Screeeeuch….scrape, scratch - "Mind your head, Alyx," -….Za-BANG.
Screeeeuch….scrape…Za-BANG.
It took a good ten minutes to clear a path.
A coffee table shattered against the far wall.
"Thing packs a punch," Gordon said, grinning.
Alyx nodded slightly, her teeth clenched in pain as she struggled not to rub her aching-itching-healing leg.
Gordon regarded her silently.
"Alyx," he said, kneeling down. "Why does no one want to go to Ravenholm?"
"Headcrabs," she answered immediately. "Sorry, I thought someone had told you…Combine found out it had some connections…with the rebel base," she winced, "and Breen ordered they shell it. I wasn't there…it was years ago, I think I was sixteen."
Gordon felt his stomach drop a little at the mention of headcrabs.
"Ravenholm was the first time they weaponized them," Alyx continued. "And they overestimated how many would be needed…"
Gordon was rubbing his eyes underneath his glasses. An image opened up, involuntarily, before his mind: of a red, hazy sun in a green nebulous sky, of tie-dyed mesas, and that four-legged behemoth, that single enormous scrotum, that wail it released from the chambers of its carapace…
Suddenly, he finished Alyx's sentence, "And the Combine shot - let me guess - a hundred canisters of headcrabs into a single, backwards Romanian town. Twenty, thirty headcrabs a canister; so, thousands of headcrabs at once - How wide of a radius does the Combine have to secure now, to prevent an outbreak?"
Alyx, somewhat surprised, answered, "About one hundred miles, last time I checked."
"And how big was the town?" Gordon continued.
"Only seven miles across, at most. It's fuzzy after that, obviously. No one was going near it after…after the survivors got back. It was…well, anyway, the headcrab zone was up to seventy miles in only a year."
"Seventy miles in a year?"
"The spread slowed after that. The Combine finally got a handle on it."
Gordon started laughing, but the laughter was cold and it did not make Alyx feel comfortable. "Sorry," Gordon said. "It isn't funny…but they probably tried gassing the area as soon as they realized what they'd done. Breen was probably working off of data from the first Black Mesa, from the Lambda complex. Lambda thought mustard gas was the most effective means for killing them. And they were right - sulfur mustard takes about two minutes to kill a headcrab - but they had only tested headcrabs one by one. In a group, the moment they realize they're dying, they start breeding at an insane rate. They're hermaphroditic, so they just fertilize each other's eggs. Half a minute to smell the gas, half a minute to prepare -"
"And then a one-minute headcrab orgy?"
Gordon laughed darkly again. "The circle of life."
Alyx was quiet for a moment. "Then, their eggs grow in their corpses," she said, "and as soon as the gas is gone, they eat their way out. Kleiner told me about it. It took him years to figure it out, because they're so dangerous - how did you…? Did you see it during the Black Mesa Incident…?"
"Not in Black Mesa, no," Gordon replied. "On Xen. I had to…pass through an…area. I saw their whole life cycle, or rather, life cycles. There's different possibilities, apparently. Some of what I saw didn't make...sense."
Alyx nodded.
"I never really liked Biology," Gordon added.
Alyx blinked. "You mean, in general?"
"No, no, Biology class. In school."
"Oh, right. School, right."
"I was good at it," Gordon continued, "I was good at all the sciences, actually...but I preferred physics." Gordon looked at Alyx curiously, though trying not to shine his flashlight directly in her face. She looked sad, pensive, even bitter.
"How's your leg…?" Gordon asked.
"Hurts," Alyx replied. Then suddenly, "We're going into Ravenholm, to find 'Chekov'."
"Yes. That's what Eli said."
"Something about me being a good hacker."
Gordon hesitated. "Yes."
Silence.
"I came to your room so late for a reason," Gordon finally said, mentally throwing his hands up in the air. "Your Dad and Mossman have been downloading your hacked data and sending it to Ravenholm, I assume to Chekov. Ravenholm sounds uninhabitable, so Chekov is probably a computer. Anyway, Eli and Mossman then corrupt the data, and tell you it was corrupt to begin with. So Eli is probably sending us to go get it, because he can't really continue his project anymore, now that Black Mesa East is compromised. I saw them doing this, and ran back to tell you, but you were..."
Silence.
"If you need things to throw," Gordon said, "I could get you something."
"That isn't funny," Alyx sighed.
Crap. "It wasn't meant to be. Sorry."
"No, no, it's...listen," Alyx said, eyes closed. "Gordon, what precisely did you see?"
"I saw the diagnostics on the computer screen - they were pretty clear. Then Mossman came in, and then Eli, both talking like -"
"Mossman came in first?" Alyx interrupted.
"Yes, but they were both...Eli seemed to know about the download happening -"
"But maybe he didn't…"
"I'm sorry, but -"
"No, no, listen…" Alyx winced again, "that's not how he...he wouldn't...we don't know that. We don't know. And I can't…" she said something sharply, under her breath, "we don't...listen, it doesn't matter. Thanks for telling me. But it doesn't matter. We've been sitting here too long anyway -"
"Alyx…"
Alyx was trying to stand up, but halfway up her eyes grew wide; she gasped in pain, clutching at her leg, and slid back down the wall. She snarled something under her breath. Then, "We don't...there's nothing we can...nothing we can do about that now. I can't think about that now. I don't care. Who cares, right? Eli's probably dead. They're both probably dead."
"He's not dead," Gordon countered. "You sent Dog to him. Dog's a tank."
"Dog is a tank," she agreed wearily.
"Darn straight, or whatever," Gordon offered.
"We're going to see Chekov. That'll...that'll explain everything. That's what Dad said, right?"
"Sure, I think so. We're going to find Chekov."
"In Ravenholm."
"In Ravenholm, yes."
Alyx asked, "Are you scared?"
Gordon gave a hollow laugh. "Terrified."
Alyx smiled slightly. "But you keep being brave."
"What else am I going to do?" Gordon replied. "Are you scared?"
Alyx didn't answer for a moment.
"You have no idea," she said finally.
Silence.
Steam and smoke were pouring from Gordon's overheating mind. Do it, do it, do it, do it...
"We better...or, you better get moving -" Alyx began, when suddenly, and a bit awkwardly, Gordon leaned over and pecked her, warmly, on the cheek. He drew quickly back, horrified to see her expression: but she had a surprised smile, and a wry raise of the eyebrow.
Gordon cleared his throat. "I'm going to check the path ahead, down the stairs, just a second."
"Oh, you charmer," Alyx said, almost laughing. "You told me you'd never kissed before."
But Gordon had already disappeared.
At the bottom of the stairs was a chain-link gateway with another sign - "Do Not Enter" - fastened to it. The floor was flooded with dark water; it flowed very slowly to the right, seeping into an increasingly porous stone wall.
"That water will infect your wounds," Gordon had suggested, as if nothing had happened.
And thus, he ended up carrying her across. She was on his back, and the gravity gun was on hers.
It was silent and dark. The only light was Gordon's suit. The water ruffled like silk around his armored calves, and occasionally, he saw something tiny and blind wriggle between them. Now and then he felt small round pebbles under his boots.
"Must be an underground river nearby," Gordon suggested, wondering if he needed to keep talking to her. "The tunnel was breached somehow."
"Worms," Alyx said. "They damage things sometimes."
Gordon noticed three little water creepers at once, squiggling around his legs. "You mean these things?"
"Hm? No, big worms. Really big. Black Mesa has a force field that keeps them away. But we shut it down for the Ravenholm passage, after the...incident...to conserve power. But don't worry, they're never that big. We'll get through-"
BEEP BEEP
clickclickclickclickclick -
Gordon stumbled around, almost dropping Alyx in the water. She blew through her teeth in pain.
Gordon already had his pistol out with his right arm - But all he saw in the darkness were two large, mechanized turrets, held on tripod legs in the water, against a stone wall. They had red eyes - motion sensors - and were desperately trying to fire at Gordon with depleted magazines.
clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
….what were they shooting at? Gordon thought immediately.
…
"Oh no," Alyx groaned aloud.
Gordon became aware of a sickening odor, fogging lazily in the stale cavern air.
"Ah…jeez…" Alyx whispered.
Gordon turned around -
In the pale circle of his flashlight: bones and meat.
Piles of meat-draped skeletons, rising out of the shallow water, up-current.
They were covered in thousands of the little blind creepers - little troglodytes, white leeches or bottom-feeders, silently suckling the last morsels of rotten flesh from the old corpses' moldering bones. Rotting flesh, rotten meat - the odor was only made bearable by the little scavengers' work, having digested a good portion of the meat years ago.
Gordon looked down at his feet. He realized that he hadn't been stepping on pebbles, but on bullets, dragged gradually down the current from the clean-picked bones of the bottommost bodies. Thousands of dull bullets…
Gordon waded his way through the boneyard. The hazard suit protected him, and he strove to keep Alyx's legs high enough that she didn't brush anything.
Waterlogged marrow crumbled under his footfalls.
The turrets clearly are responsible, Gordon reasoned. All of the bodies are facing, more-or-less, the same direction: away from Ravenholm. But their distribution suggests uncoordinated motion. And I don't see any bodies that haven't been significantly rotted and digested. So this all happened a while ago. An uncoordinated group moving away from Ravenholm into the oncoming fire of turrets, until the turrets ran out of ammunition.
Zombies. They were all zombies.
They came to a staircase that led out of the water. They had left the boneyard behind. Alyx dropped to the ground and began limping across the dirt and stone floor. After a few minutes, they came to a row of parallel railways, each stretching down a perfectly straight corridor into the fog of shadows far away. Scattered next to the tracks were a dozen makeshift mine carts, with front lights and moldy cushions fixed into their beds.
Gordon set Alyx against a wall.
"I remember this," she said. "Four-hour trip, sitting in those things, when they're going fast. Two days on foot. Took us two years to build this tunnel."
"How?" Gordon asked, as he examined one of the carts.
"The Vortigaunts did the heavy lifting…I wasn't allowed to watch because I was a little brat and it was dangerous. But they did something - and it sure was something."
Gordon hesitated. "How are you feeling? How's the leg?"
"I'm fine. Just…tired. If you put a cart on the tracks, I think I remember how to start it going."
After a few minutes of heaving, Gordon lined one up on the middle rail. He picked up Alyx again, and set her as carefully as he could into the cart. She looked in pain, but didn't vocalize it. Gordon climbed in with her, just in case.
There was a sort of dashboard on the front, like a pilot's cockpit. Alyx was experimenting with the dials.
snap CRACK
"Oh!"
fizzzzzzzzzz
kraKOW
The mine cart leapt twenty feet forward down the track. Gordon and Alyx were lashed back and then forward. Gordon nearly cracked his head on the front edge of the cart.
"Sorry! You alright?" Alyx asked.
"Fine."
"Just a second, it just had a lot of - anyway…"
fizzzzzzzzzz
crackle crackle
It began moving again, with a more gradual acceleration.
The pair of them settled back in the cramped cart, their sides pressed together. Gordon gazed at the dim ceiling as the cart picked up speed. The light on the pockmarked stone looked like a revolving night sky.
"Four hours?" he said; the cart was surprisingly quiet, so he only had to raise his voice slightly.
"Four hours," Alyx confirmed. "I'm going to sleep." And she attempted to rest her head against Gordon's plated shoulder.
"Sorry, I'm not much a pillow," he said dryly.
"Here, not a problem -" and somewhat awkwardly, in the small space of the cart, she slid off her leather jacket, and turned it inside out, so the faux-wool was showing. She plumped this upon his shoulder, and purposively nestled against him, shivering a little in her old, thin sweatshirt.
Gordon, methodically, removed the plating from his arm and shoulder; his arm was bare and goosefleshed in the whirling cavern air. "That help?" he asked.
"It does, thanks." Alyx tried to wrap her jacket a little around his arm so it wouldn't be so cold.
Gordon twitched his nose.
Should I be feeling something right now?
I don't really have a baseline to compare this to - to see what psychological effects the Citadel has…
But for that matter, I don't have a baseline for non-Gordon-Freeman people, either.
There was that hot fog, for sure, that made his skull tingle. But now there was also a dull throb in his chest and stomach, like the last, lonely cinder in a fireplace, buried under piles and piles of ash, struggling not to go out, optimizing every whiff of oxygen it could get - Perhaps it had always been there, since he had come under the Citadel, but his experimental kiss had dusted off some of the ash and given it a little more hope and life.
By now Alyx was dozing; her weight pressed against his.
Gordon looked at the fake stars on the ceiling, rushing eternally past them.
The end of the line.
Gordon and Alyx had both fallen asleep - Gordon's head had sunk down onto Alyx's, her hair serving as a very thin pillow. He was snoring slightly. When the cart reached the end, it gave off a loud KRACK as the breaks kicked in and jerked them both forwards and awake. Hearts pounding, it took them both a minute to remember where they were, and what was happening.
"Good morning to you too," Gordon muttered absently to the cart. His glasses were askew and sleep was still dragging down his eyes. Alyx blinked; her hair was matted and rustled, and her jaw slack. She had left a damp patch of drool on her coat wool. Gordon, to his sudden horror, realized he had also left a little drool on the crown of Alyx's head. He attempted, as surreptitiously as he could, to wipe it off with the sleeve of Alyx's coat, or the cloth of her backpack. But she had already reached up to straighten her hair a bit - and felt the bit of drool. She blinked, and then, almost against her will, started laughing behind her hand.
"I'm glad you're taking it so well," Gordon said, starting to smile along with her.
But slowly both of their smiles faded, as they remembered where they were. They looked into each other's eyes, then forwards, to a broken elevator, and a service ladder, leading up to the surface.
"This is it," Alyx said soberly.
Alyx's leg was, as far as they could tell, reasonably healed. She only had a slight limp, but assured Gordon the juice was past the window of danger.
Alyx: their backpack of supplies, a 9 millimeter, a Colt Python, a Bowie knife, and the Gravity Gun on her back.
Gordon: the hazard suit, a SMG, and a bloodstained crowbar.
They stood before the service ladder, which ironically ascended into the pitch heavens of the cavern.
Gordon suddenly felt a peck on his cheek.
"For luck," Alyx said.
Headcrabs.
Or, as Gordon thought of them, "frog ticks."
Like a starfish, they were legs attached to a gaping, circular maw.
On Xen, Gordon had discovered several kinds of fungus, which blossomed into balloon-sized knobs. Headcrabs suckered onto these knobs for days at a time, stretching over them and clamping down, piercing the rind with their finger-fangs and cartilage circle-jaw. Like a tick, they would drain the knob of its lifeblood, and replace it with various kinds of bile, pumped directly into the fungal channels. Purple, blue, green, yellow – these injections caused the fungus to grow and die in different ways and directions. Headcrabs were gardeners.
Occasionally, a headcrab would fuse with a fungal nipple, like a male angler fish. It would half digest into a splotch on its rind. The whole growth would then detach from its mother root, sprout legs, and metamorphose into a monster – a headcrab without a maw, but instead, a dangling sac, dripping black bile. Headcrabs would flock to it, sucking up the droplets of ebony honey, and vainly trying to grip and couple with the swinging, slippery sac, falling and getting smashed underfoot. The great scrotumed demon would parade around the hive for weeks, a Bacchic god of orgiastic pandemonium – until finally it starved to death, and was lustily devoured, like a spider by its hungry, desperate children.
That was how it was on Xen.
But on Earth, the closest thing to a fungal node was a human head. The headcrabs latched on instinctively, drained blood and cerebrospinal fluid, and, attempting to catalyze growth in the "node," they pumped great quantities of green slime into the host's veins and body cavities. The slime was a mutagen targeting nucleotides, causing bizarre but characteristic developments: lengthened fingers, split abdomen forming a semi-functional jaw, and a remarkable resilience to trauma. The headcrab could also learn, by means unclear to Freeman, how to manipulate the host's brain, and clumsily, recklessly, violently, drive its movements. On Xen, they always fought to defend their wormy fungal garden, like bees defending their hive. On Earth, they fought out of confused instinct: to vent their irritation, to protect an unclear nest, to half feed a half-maw struggling to gain sentience from sternum to navel. They were hornets with an ever-missing hive.
Sometimes, they would abandon their hosts in order to mate, or because the body stopped producing nectar for them – that is, cerebrospinal fluid.
According to Lambda lab reports, cerebrospinal fluid acted as an addictive amphetamine for headcrabs. If too much was consumed, then the headcrab began to undergo certain changes. They became faster, thinner, lighter, more ambitious, and far hungrier.
As for the formation of scrotumed crabs, Gordon could only remember one file that may have pertained to it, when he was ransacking the Lambda labs. But all of its information was redacted, and it was labeled to be destroyed that very day.
The ladder was ten stories high. They had only been one hundred feet underground; but it was a grueling climb, nonetheless. They finally heaved their way to the top, collapsed, and rested.
They were in a small wooden building, a kind of multi-room shed. Without the hazard suit's flashlight they were blind in the utter darkness of the space. But under its yellow-white beam, Alyx noted that the place had been hastily boarded off with hammer and nail – and then just as hastily torn through by the advancing…hordes.
Gordon remembered too well the resilience and single-minded persistence of the headcrabs' drones. Bones were of much less consequence than raw muscle mass and tendons. A hundred foot fall would only stop them for a few minutes, Gordon thought, while the headcrab's slime bound up the fractures. And then, more zombies could fall on top of them, cushioned from the full blow, and suffer less damage. It's only when they march into the turrets that they start dropping for good; enough bullets will rip apart muscle and tendon as well as bone. And the headcrabs themselves.
The scene reconstructed itself in his mind: the drones broke through to chase the survivors, fell down the shaft, continued along, ran into the turrets, fell by the truckloads until the bullets ran out. The rest retreated, or the headcrabs abandoned their hosts to escape. Headcrabs are mostly cartilage, or something like it: so the dead crabs wouldn't last nearly as long as the human bones.
"Gordon?" Alyx inquired.
"Sorry, just thinking."
They advanced through the building, passing through two more breached doorways. Rusty red stains were smeared up and down the walls and floor. Gordon turned off the flashlight as they approached the exit.
They stepped out of the shadows, into the diffused glow of a cloud-veiled moon, that barely lit the yard in a foggy twilight. The December air was frosty; Gordon thought he could see his breath in the dim night. The lot was overgrown with dirty weeds – it was fenced in by houses: a quaint assemblage of brick and wood buildings, hugging together in old European style, with only a few alleyways between them. On the far side was a dark, brambly tree; Gordon almost thought he could see a rope-swing hanging from its branches. The world was silent, almost at peace: merely a cemetery.
Gordon took a step forward –
He felt something odd beneath his boot.
He looked down: there was a wide, half-crumpled, metal sign.
"Ravenholm".
A cold breeze passed through the lot, like the breath of a ghost. Alyx breathed in sharply as it bit her face. The far tree rustled quietly, the grasses swayed and shushed.
But Gordon and Alyx both twitched their noses – there was, carried on the breeze, that sick-sweet odor of rotten flesh and flies…
…
Ba-ZZAP.
LIGHTS.
It nearly blinded both Gordon and Alyx, who leapt a foot in the air. Gordon couldn't help but let out a yelp. Five lamps, scattered through the lot, had simultaneously, and spontaneously, cracked on. They buzzed like bug-catchers; yellow as oil, but compared with the twilight, bright as day. They cast their yellow glow, however dimly, against the billowing clouds above, blazing like a cheap carnival for passing air traffic.
A small murder of blue-black crows took flight, cawing angrily, as they winged over Gordon and Alyx, over the shed they had just exited.
"What -?!" Alyx hissed, staring around them.
Gordon said nothing – he had taken another look at the rope swing.
It was not attached to a swing. It was attached to a human pelvis.
The legs were still there, dangling like marionette limbs. It still had its mildewed jeans on, now greened from bleeding rot.
Gordon felt sick. Even a little dizzy. He ignored it, keeping his gun at the ready.
There are survivors here, Gordon thought. People with engineering skills. They must have placed a sensor camera somewhere. But…why? Is it an alarm? Headcrabs react more to sound than light…
"We need to go," Alyx was saying. "This is a bad start. I don't like it. C'mon." She was already moving forwards, her pistol and knife at the ready. Gordon followed after with the SMG, eyes darting around, mapping their surroundings instinctively. In the new light, he could see two half-buried rocket cannisters, long opened and emptied, crashed in corners of the yard.
They approached the human legs. Directly above them, a lamp had been drilled into the tree, like a stage spotlight. The rope swayed slightly in a passing breeze; multiple shadows danced beneath them on the ground. The odor was overwhelming – for Gordon, horribly familiar. The rope was attached to an iron hook jammed into the pelvic bone. Gordon could now see how the grayed tissues were coated with a green-tinted gel – he could trace the faint, inhuman odor of it, hidden in the pungency of the corpse: a sour, pickled smell.
"These legs are from a zombie," he said, almost to himself. "The headcrab's preservatives have kept the flesh on the bones."
Alyx took a deep breath. "Chekov's work? Whoever he is?"
Gordon didn't answer, not even to shrug.
BzzzTAPzzzz—
They both jumped again. Another light had crackled on, from within a nearby building: a wooden building, sloppily boarded up. Yellow light leaked through the cracks.
"There must be motion sensors," Gordon voiced.
"There," Alyx said, pointing. Gordon looked, and after a moment caught sight of a small, black tube lens attached to the roof of the workshop, peering down at the tree and its visitors.
Gordon nodded.
"What are they for?" Alyx muttered.
"Dunno," Gordon murmured. "Let's go ask him." He approached the building with the crowbar drawn, and made short work of the rotten boards.
The inside was a small dingy workshop, with a workbench, iron railings for storing tools, and –
Half cloaked in shadow, was the upper torso of a man, pinned to the far wall by a foot-wide sawblade.
"Found the rest of that guy," Gordon said, almost inaudibly.
The rusty serrated disk was embedded a good four inches into the wall, and now fully supported the weight of the corpse's upper half, which lay half-frozen in rigor mortis upon it. The hands were mutated – the fingers elongated into freakish claws. The head was twisted up at ninety degrees, so that the face could stare directly at Gordon and Alyx with long emptied sockets, and death-white, mummified features, their expression forever testifying of agony. It smelled faintly sour – the facial skin looked strangely wrinkled – suckered…and blood all over the walls -
He glanced around the workshop: there were long propane tanks stacked on the walls, and tables covered in cables, circuits, scrap metal, sawblades, motors…
Alyx pulled out the gravity gun. With a couple sudden jerks, the sawblade embedded in the wall sprung free, and raced into the gun's grasp, positioned horizontally so Alyx could still see ahead. The torso fell unceremoniously to the floor with a gross thud.
She was already on the move. She seemed impatient, restless. Gordon could not blame her. She turned a corner to enter a neighboring room, lit only by the indirect light of the previous.
Gordon approached the fallen body.
Not long after the Incident began, Gordon had broken into Bill Guthrie's lab, shattering the glass with a crowbar…Guthrie had been in a seizure at his desk, as a headcrab had engulfed his head, pumping him…Gordon cut into the beast with a scalpel, and so much green slime sprayed out, like from a pressure hose – So much cartilage to cut through – Gordon got the thing off his head and face, but his neck had already been snapped, his skin stretched and split and…and…
What on earth flung the sawblade? Gordon thought suddenly, absently…
"Gordon!" Alyx was hissing, almost desperately. "Please, snap out of it! Please!"
Gordon looked over at Alyx, his glasses opaque from the lamp's glare. Alyx had crouched next to him, shaking him by the shoulder, looking desperate, eyes a little wide, her cool demeanor suddenly showing cracks.
"Flashbacks?" she asked, calming down.
"I'm sorry. Yes."
"Any way to not have them?"
"I'm sorry. I will be fine."
"Okay. But the next room is…not fun."
She doesn't want to be alone? Gordon thought.
The smell had grown almost unbearable. Sick, rotten, raw pork; Gordon could not imagine what a humid summer would do to the odor.
The room, only half lit, was scattered with bodies.
Headcrab zombies.
Seven or eight full bodies, with four or five pairs of legs strewn about like lost Legos. What is cutting them in half? Gordon wondered. He then, to his surprise, felt a convulsion in his stomach, and he threw up a little bit onto the floor. Alyx looked at him, eyes wide again, on edge. But Gordon shook his head and waved his hand. "I'm fine," he said lowly. "Just the smell, I think."
The eight zombies: their heads were enveloped in headcrabs, motionless as stones – or stick bugs hiding from sight. They were brown and fleshy and clutched to their victims with awful strength, their foreclaws almost gripping onto the clavicles like roller coaster safety bars. Four bodies were leaned against the walls, two were face down, and two face up, sprawled on the floor in pools of blood and mucus. They were all still, somehow, clothed, but in the most mildewed, rotten torn-up flannels and jeans and slacks and linens and jackets one could imagine; they hung from their gray bodies like thick cobwebs.
At the sound of Gordon's voice, one of the bodies twitched, and fell over. There was a faint, low, garbled croak.
Gordon made a motion forwards. "I think they're conserving energy," he murmured. "I don't see from their anatomy how they could function long-term in the cold."
Alyx was breathing heavily, and she nodded, moving forwards. She quietly released the sawblade from the gravity gun, to give her more maneuverability.
They made their way into a hallway. Several more zombies were leaned against the walls, silent as corpses.
"Let's try another way," Gordon murmured. He stepped into another room, turning on his chest flashlight. Another zombie was lying on a bed, a wretched, bony arm dangling off the side. It was a man – he was bare chested. The bones pressed up against the skin. The fingers were long, bony, sharp – and the chest was split wide open, something red was half falling out –
As they passed, Gordon watched as the hand slowly reached up to rest beside the rest of the body.
Another room –
BZZAP.
Alyx and Gordon flinched. Another light had buzzed on, revealing a large rectangular space. A table nearby was covered in sawblades. There were several pairs of legs scattered across the floor, the upper halves missing. And in the center was a strange contraption: a pivot the size of a car motor, rigged to a pinwheel blade, the size of an airplane propeller, rusty, but sharp and ruthless looking. If the pinwheel began to spin, it would be horrific. And it was coated with dry blood and mucus.
"What is this?" Alyx murmured, almost angry.
"I take it this wasn't here."
"I don't know, I was never in this building. But it – there is no reason…" She coughed as quietly as she could into her arm, "It's a trap. Chekov has made zombie traps…that's what this is…"
…
A voice from overhead.
It was soft at first, but came upon them like the frosty wind, rattling through the rotting shop – it was guttural, deep, base, and hoarse from shouting -
"Căci zilele vieții mele au dispărut ca fumul, și oasele mele au căzut ca cenușă! Și toate impuritățile mele să fie ca și combustibil pentru focul acela, până când nu rămâne nimic - NUMAI LUMINA!"
The last phrase was hurled out from the hidden man's lungs – he was somewhere on the rooftops above –
There were moans, throughout the building.
"For my days…are gone, like smoke…" Alyx whispered, translating, "and my…bones, they are ashes…"
Moooaaaahhhhh
"…all my impurities, they should burn, or be in the fire, until nothing remains…"
Thump.
"— except the Light."
THUMP-CRACK.
A section of aged wall was half-split open by a ferocious effort on its opposite side.
Long-fingered hands were reaching through, tearing skin against the splintered wood.
MOOOOOAAAAHHHHHHHH
More zombies were stumbling their way up towards the doorway where Alyx and Gordon had entered. The only way out left was a boarded-up door on the room's far side, across from the split wall.
MOOOOOAAAAAAHHHHHH
Gordon already knew the situation. He had, without Alyx even realizing, seized the gravity gun from her back, and was firing wantonly at the boarded door. Mustard yellow lightning leapt from its pinchers like a chameleon tongue, and blasted the boards inwards. Splinters flew –
"Gordon!"
He caught sight of it in his peripheral vision: the bottom maw of a headcrab.
Terror seized him. It had been a long little while since he had seen this and felt it hit his skin BANGBANG piercing in his ears it felt like dried fish but then wetness and the smell of blood and sweet rot his eyes were blurry –
He was on the ground.
THUMP-CRACK. The wall was splitting more. Two things leapt out. He could see with highly blurry vision – where were his glasses? Oh there they were. How were his glasses not broken yet? Oh there was a chip on them. "Gordon! Gordon!" He couldn't feel the headcrab anymore why was that he didn't know – He did not expect to react quite like this it had gotten so close they had never gotten so close before he hadn't ever let them get that close heaven help me it almost had me it was so slimy and bloody I felt its teeth on my skull heaven heaven help…
"GORDON!"
Something was touching his skull again.
Gordon leapt half to his knees – he hollered involuntarily - his arm reached up – he seized the leg of something – he swung it around, dashed it against the floor –
Another was flying towards him – BANGBANG – Alyx shot it out of the air – There was another on the floor – SLAMcRunCH with the crowbar – a splatter of yellow-green like pickle relish –
But everything was still blurry, too blurry – Where did his glasses go –
THUMP-CRRRACKKKK-SHUMMMMM
The section of wall fell – There was a twisted, blurry knot of moaning zombies -They moaned as one…muffled human mouths and diaphragms…wheezing into the night…aaaahhhhhhhooooooo…The moaning was joined throughout the house, like an echo: aaaaaahhhhhhooooooo…The bodies, faces wrapped in grey and beige, crawled to their broken feet and came stumbling, tumbling, lurching forwards – climbing over each other like two-legged rats –
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHOOOOOOO
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG
Gordon let the SMG riddle them. They were to him a wall of fuzzy flesh – an impressionist painting - Casings covered the floor, bursts of green fluid spattered everywhere, some of the zombies stumbled and fell prone, but with every bit of muscle left they kept crawling forwards –
Alyx had seized back the gravity gun – a sawblade leapt into its grasp. With a trigger, it launched – The blade cut deep into the foremost zombie, new colors spattered Gordon's vision -
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG
Alyx seized another sawblade: CRAKOW – Gordon thought it decapitated another zombie, and rendered another immobile on the ground…
His mind raced…more were coming into the room, clamoring from every cranny of the house – Where were his glasses…
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGclickclickclickclick
Gordon threw the gun at the nearest zombie, which batted it aside with a mutant hand.
"Under! UNDER!" Alyx screamed. Gordon swiveled around, she was crouched underneath the pinwheel of death – Gordon ducked down with her – she was searching for something – "TURN IT ON! TURN IT ON!"
Zombies were upon them from every side.
Gordon found a metal breaker – he slammed it down –
Sparks flew, some smoke fumed out –
The death pinwheel accelerated to nearly thirty miles an hour in a second.
SLICE-SHUMP-SLOWSL-CHLUMP-
In one rotation, the propeller had created another five pairs of legs. The torsos went flying into the walls from the force.
SLICE SHUMP SCHOWLP
Several more zombies had blindly stumbled to take their places, and were likewise disposed of.
The propeller was boasting forty-five miles an hour. It screamed like a tea kettle, over a low rumbling unmuffled motor.
Gordon and Alyx remained, still as scared rabbits, underneath the guillotine fan.
Alyx reached over and deposited Gordon's glasses, miraculously unharmed, onto his face.
His breath came heavy.
There were at least five hostless headcrabs scrambling around on the floor. One made a leap for Gordon – it sprung too high and WHAP SMASH – into the wall.
Another approached without jumping – Alyx shot it dead, and Gordon flipped the body upwards with his crowbar – WHAP SMACK.
The headcrabs were gurgling, croaking, pacing. The zombies swayed in place, as if uncertain…They were moaning in time with each other, in awful chorus – maaaaaahhhhhhhooooooo…
Alyx and Gordon's pulses were in time too, thumping in their veins.
The remaining horde remained on the edges, watching the blade spin.
No – not watching, Gordon thought. Listening, and talking. They know something is in the center, and that it killed several of them -
One more tentatively approached – SCWHOP – the torso flew up into the air like a punted pigskin, and fell back into the whirling blade – it was cut in half again, both pieces flying across the room, smacking into two loitering zombies – one of them had its headcrab explode like a pinched tick, and it slid down the wall almost comically.
"Well, now we just have to wait here until sunrise," Gordon said sarcastically.
But Alyx's eyes widened with horror.
The severed torsos, after a minute of lying scattered across the ground, were flinching with renewed life.
They began dragging themselves.
They were dragging themselves across the floor, soggy intestines trailing behind.
They were too low to be hit by the blade. They approached from every side.
Gordon's mind raced – Not enough ammunition. We should have brought more, but they require so much to take down. Not enough time to hit them all with the gravity gun. Too heavy to flip up into the blade -
Alyx fired the gravity gun, without anything in it – a lone bolt of yellow leaped out from its pinchers, and shoved one of the zombies back a few feet. But it shook off the effect and continued clawing forwards – slowly but surely -
"You couldn't do this at Black Mesa!" Gordon shouted angrily at them. And he thought, all in a moment - We can easily evade them if we could stand up. But we can't stand up because we have to keep the walkers away. If there were no walkers, then we could stand up. We need the walkers to walk into the blade. They won't walk into the blade because they can hear it.
"Trust me," Gordon suddenly assured Alyx.
And he shut off the blade machine.
The tea kettle squeal subsided –
mmmoooooAAAAAAAHHHHHH
The walkers stumbled forwards, like drunken men beginning a race – in a few steps they overtook the crawlers – they were upon Gordon and Alyx, their chests were open wide –
Gordon had the gravity gun in his hand. He fired it at an angle.
Mustard lightning struck the pinwheel, forcing it forwards, forty miles an hour instantly –
In one rotation, it sliced through the six closest zombies like warm butter.
Gordon fired again.
The other six had already approached, not hearing the tea kettle whistle –
They were cut just as cleanly.
Gordon pulled the first trigger, and the blade stopped instantly, caught in the gun's invisible vice grip.
"Up, up, up," Gordon intoned, taking Alyx by the arm. They were on their feet, the crawlers struggling below them. Gordon struck one beneath his bootheel, and with a bony crackle, stomped its headcrab in. The long hands swiped vainly at his hazard suit.
Alyx took a deep breath – "Nice," she managed. And then taking back the gravity gun, seized a sawblade, and destroyed another of the crawlers.
In another minute, nothing was left moving in the room, but themselves.
In the distance, the echoing continued, like a bombing alarm – moooooaaaahhhhh…
And Gordon thought he could hear that gravely voice on the wind, crying out in Romanian.
Alyx, not saying a word, slowly rested her forehead against Gordon's chest plate. Her breath was heaving. Gordon reached his arms around to hold the back of her head.
She was holding back tears. "It's so horrible," she said simply.
"Yes," Gordon replied.
"We need to keep moving."
"Yes."
Gordon kissed her on the crown of her head, and somewhat compulsively returned a loose lock of hair into her headband.
What is going on in this town, Gordon stated to himself, as though it were too mysterious to even pose as a question.
…
When the gravely voice cried out, nearer now, "Căci se spune că au ajuns ca acei demoni, care trăiesc în materie, dar în care nu se găsește nici o lumină!"
The bedraggled, green spattered couple turned together to listen.
"They come as demons that live in material, but in which there is no light," Alyx said, looking towards the half-blockaded exit, and the darkness beyond. "It sounds like he's…quoting something."
"He brought the zombies on us with his racket," Gordon murmured. "I think he knows we're here."
"Let's go ask him," Alyx said, and began where Gordon left off on the door.
They exited into a cold street.
They heard the voice crying from the left: "Am fost așezat într-o groapă de întuneric și umbra morții. Și mânia ta a apăsat asupra mea; și toate grijile tale au coborât asupra mea. Și din acest pat am strigat pentru aprinderea Luminii tale!"
"Something about a seat of darkness and a pit, and 'from this seat I cried for the lighting of your Light –"
KABANG.
Gordon and Alyx rushed forwards, and rounded a corner in the street. They were just in time to see how, down this new alley, in a great courtyard, a great gas explosion had erupted in blue, purple and orange flame – dancing light, a great powerful pyre in the courtyard's center – Gordon could see in silhouette, terrible spires amidst the flames, with bodies speared upon them – all the surrounding buildings were now illuminated in the orgy of light, the cacophony of fire, which swirled and constantly threatened to get out of hand – the moans of the dead raked through the night air – and there were terrible screams and screaming breaking through the alien wailing – zombies, zombies on fire, stumbling down the street, their arms waving in the air, several running straight towards Gordon and Alyx –
The crash of a door – and there emerged a figure from a building behind the pyre – he strode out onto a scaffold porch, and stood unaffected in the awful smoke and gas – Gordon spied a rifle in the large figure's hands – and as the man took aim, he broke into a hideous, full laugh.
"Ah ha, Ha HA HA AHAHA HA HA! HA! HAHAHA!"
BLAM.
One flaming zombie collapsed, the headcrab blown half off.
BLAM.
Another zombie down.
BLAM. Another.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
…
The man lowered his rifle. And then his voice thundered across the area.
"Ce este asta? Un alt vizitator pentru Chekov?"
"Visitors for Chekov," Alyx repeated to herself, and then strode forwards, closer into the light. Gordon followed protectively behind, a pit in his stomach. "Yes!" Alyx began, shouting up towards the man. "Suntem prieteni…ah…ai lui Eli Vance! Are you Chekov? Ești Chekov?"
The dark figure seemed to cock his head in interest. Then, in a very thick, almost unintelligible accent, declared in English:
"I am not Chekov. I am Father Grigori, his…servant. My master awaits you at the Church – if you survive his…trials."
Silence, but for the roar of the fire.
"I'll keep my eye on you," Father Grigori assured, almost laughing. "But more than that, I cannot promise!"
And he retreated into the building.