Chapter 3: Hell and High Water
It all started 2 weeks ago; I was the Demo expert in an elite sabotage squad. We were on a mission to destroy a strider construction plant. We got in and got out without a hitch. It was too easy. The Combine had known we were coming, they set up an ambush. We were coming out of the plant and were about to detonate the bomb when they struck. The squad of ten was turned to a 3-man group just like that… The rest of us… we just ran. I ran into the nearest civilian building and ran straight to the roof. There I jumped from building to building until I was out of sight of the ambush.
I stayed in the squad base for 3 days… when no one showed up, I gave up. I grabbed a mini-nuke det. Pack and I headed to the nearest Combine processing plant to do one, last mission… I got in, fought my way through 12 CPs, and prepped the bomb. I turned my back to it and got out the detonator, and pressed the button… but nothing happened. I turned around to see a group of Overwatch. I panicked, I ran. They chased after me until I got to the edge of the city.
There I actually managed to jack a Combine half-track, and while I was escaping into the woods I was hit by a strider bomb. By the time the recovery team got to car, I was long gone. Unfortunately I had nowhere to go. The Combine knew my face, they knew who I was and would be looking for me. So I picked a direction, north, and walked.
This is where I saw things, horrible things. The weapons the Combine used during the Seven Hours War did something… something to the bodies. When the maggots came to eat it, they became infected; everything the bodies touched became infected. And everything that was infected, died. And without maggots the bodies didn't decompose.
Now there was and "exception" to this…Headcrabs… The headcrabs were immune to the infection, and without the Combine there keeping them under control… well lets just say it was a hell there. I tried to spend the night in a cabin, but there wasn't a place I could hide from the zombies. The whole forest was a major battleground for the Seven Hours War; there were bodies everywhere and the crabs had taken advantage of this… god I can still hear them scream…
I wasn't the only one lost in the woods. I would often find fresh, dead bodies in the woods, and once I… I even heard a woman scream… I ran to her as fast as I could, all I got to see was a zombie… eating her dead body… that memory still haunts me…
Then one day I found an old army outpost. After Black Mesa, all the countries of the world started building up defenses, and lucky for me, this one was surrounded by walls. All I had to do is kill the zombies inside and I had a nice home… for a while, at least. Then the Combine did their "annual" training run… it was then I found out the "army" camp was actually a "Combine" camp.
They found me, identified me, and interrogated me. On a lighter note I didn't give in for 3 days of the Combines most brutal torture techniques. Afterwards they put me on a train to Copenhagen, on the way there, we were hit by a rocket, next thing I know, I'm naked in a strange place talking to you.
"That's quite a story, oh and by the way, it was actually a adhesive grenade."
