Comm chatter and gunfire: the anthem of the soldier, the battle music of the modern warrior. It was in my ears now, all those voices that were mine and not mine screeching in my ear like static from a dead TV. And the guns, erupting in their own little chorus, punctuated here and there by the whine of a dying radio channel. These screeches were voices blinking out, all immediately swallowed in the panic that followed their demise. The doctor moved between us with unprecedented and unpredictable agility, his weapon raised above his head and brought down like a club in a rusty flash. I couldn't see what it was – through the tiny, useless portholes of my mask, I could only see that I was going to die, and it was going to be at this man's hands. My shotgun barked against my shoulder, a Rottweiler off its chain with rabid spittle of buckshot flying in clumps of shell fragment from the muzzle. My shots met no target, because no-one could find it. When he appeared in my vision it was in passing, already on the way out, a snapshot of my target and enemy: a man I didn't know and was being made to murder.
All of a sudden, as my weapon barked its last and died uselessly in my hands, silence took hold of the world outside my mask. I realised now that the voices of my squad had stopped entirely, replaced only by the mournful cries of their radios in my ear, the undercurrent of the Overwatch always right fucking there, just beneath it all but never beneath enough for me to not hear it. I was alone. The rest were dead.
He stood before me, alone and glorious and inhuman, an avatar of the masses and I knew then why they called him the One Free Man. His tool – I now identified it as a crowbar, of all things – bore the blood of my allies and it adorned his face too like war paint, but he gave way to no emotion. The doctor, this gore-spattered physicist, was the Combine dream and the Combine nightmare both at once, for he was everything they wanted mankind to be and yet he was sworn against them to the very end. He raised his eyes to me now, hidden behind a flash of light in his spectacles, and approached me quickly. Not running – where was the need when I was so petrified with awe? - but not walking. Fast. Purposeful. Devoted with every fibre of his being to ending me and all those like me, reluctantly brought to the wrong side of the fight and told it was the right one. The crowbar rose above his head, blood dark in the misty evening half-light, and this was my only chance to say anything before he ended my life, so I took it. Nothing to lose. But also nothing to say, except one thing. And I would have said it but for the mask on my face, in which my words were lost through crackling and static.
The bar fell. My eyes closed. Blood filled my helmet as I hit the ground, and it might have drowned me if I weren't so sure I was already dead.