HI THERE GUYS! I'm so sorry about the maaaaaassive wait on this chapter - University crashed into me like a bull on steroids, heh. However, my work is starting to slow down a little so I churned the rest of this out when I had a spare moment today - it's been staring me in the face for about a month, you have no idea.
Apologies but it's not too long - I rounded it off quite nicely in preparation for the next chapter, which hopefully shouldn't take as long as this one - I have exams in December so things will get a little slow again. Plus, my life in general is quite busy, and I am now working on not just one but TWO novels, so they take priority over this story.
I'm sorry about the long delay, and there hopefully shouldn't be one this long again.
~Lagiacrus
The race came to an abrupt end upon the passing of the first few buildings, which were for the most part intact, but in quite a state. Caroline had never seen anything like it. When GLaDOS checked the map she could bring up of the area, she said the pictures of the buildings didn't correspond with what they looked like now. The pictures she could find displayed a wide array of brightly coloured suburban homesteads, shining metallic skyscrapers that seemed to block out the sun and delightful little shops and cafes lining the streets. It was all ruins now.
"This is Traverse City," Rosie told them. "My flat was here."
GLaDOS leaned up against an old streetlight, flicking through portions of the map with her headpiece. After a moment, she grunted in frustration.
"Why on Earth do humans need such big settlements?"
"There used to be a lot of us, GLaDOS." Rosie laughed. She rolled the motorbike up to the side of the street, where Caroline dismounted and commenced immediately her exploration.
"How many precisely?" GLaDOS asked, tearing some worn out posters off of a lamppost before tossing them aside with a sneer.
"Six billion, I think? Or something."
The look on the android's face was something very close to shock.
"That sounds awful. I can barely stand one human." She growled.
"So, what's the plan? We can't walk to the Borealis." Caroline II pointed out, smirking at the android who for whatever reason was staring very intently back at her.
"Our best option is to look for some form of vehicle that still works, then use it to get to the shore. From there we might be able to find a boat or something that flies to take us over the water." Rosie suggested, although she knew that it was wishful thinking.
"Sounds good to me!" Before anybody could think to stop her, Caroline was trotting leisurely down the street. Rosie followed wordlessly and for a moment GLaDOS watched them go. She examined more of the posters, before the deathly silence around her began to irk her. She cast her gaze down one of the side streets – she could swear she saw a tumbleweed roll its way across the road, before disappearing behind a ruined car. She looked back to Caroline and Rosie, by now so far away that she had to zoom in on them. She gulped, swallowing some of the utterly pointless simulated saliva down the back of her throat.
"W-Wait." She uttered, pursuing the two employees deeper into the ruinous world.
"Hey, GLaDOS, look at this! Oh, and this! Ooh, look at that…" Caroline zoomed in on everything of interest she could find, picking it up if it was small enough and allowing the supercomputer tailing her like a lost puppy to examine it. She was handed numerous objects, many broken, charred or just damaged overall, but it was all of use to GLaDOS.
"Rubick's Cube," Rosie was struck on the head by the multi-coloured cube as it was tossed aside by the satisfied robot. "Engine Exhaust, probably from a 4x4," The scientist just managed to dodge the flying car part. "Spatula, a common kitchen utensil," THWACK. "And – Caroline, you Imbecile, this is a gun." Rosie flinched but found that the gun did not strike her. Instead, the android handed it back to Caroline.
"Is it loaded?" She asked, to which the younger human checked the weapon clumsily. When she finally managed to check inside the magazine, she saw that a few bullets remained – it would be all she needed, hopefully.
"Yeah, it's got a few bullets left."
"Good. Keep it with you." And with that, GLaDOS' attention was stolen by something else. Caroline hung back to walk beside Rosie.
"Is it me or is GLaDOS acting funny?"
"In what way?" The scientist replied with a smirk.
"She's… being surprisingly kind," Caroline responded with, clicking the safety on and placing the handgun in her pocket."She'd never let me handle a gun back in the facility unless if it was a Portal Gun."
"I think things are a bit different now. This world is just as alien to her as it is to you – if not more. She won't be letting it on, but I think she's nervous."
Caroline nearly snickered at the thought. GLaDOS had never been one to fear the unknown, at least not at any point before.
"You really think so?"
"I know so," Rosie pointed to the android strutting a few paces ahead. "Just watch her, you'll see it."
As if on cue, there was the abrupt smashing of glass nearby, causing the android's head to snap in the direction of the offending sound. Her eyes were wide, mouth pressed into a frown and her simulated breathing seemed to be a little quicker than the norm.
"See? Back in the facility, if she'd heard a sound like that, would she have responded like that?" Rosie reasoned, to which Caroline shook her head thoughtfully.
"She barely would have glanced up, she would have just sent somebody to check it out."
"See?" She smirked at the android, who was now staring so intently at a building across the street that it made Caroline a little nervous. "She's just on high alert. I suppose I'd be the same way."
"I'm picking up faint traces of life inside that building across the street." GLaDOS said, without even turning to look at them.
"It's probably just rats or something." Rosie suggested but it was immediately shot down.
"No, the heat signature is much bigger than that." Caroline found herself grabbing hold of the gun in her pocket.
"Coyotes?"
"No," GLaDOS shook her head and finally risked them a glance. "They look human, but… something seems wrong. The head seems… enlarged." That was when Caroline looked elsewhere on the street and caught sight of an unnatural black missile-type structure, buried harshly into the cracked tarmac. The rear end of it had ruptured open, and due to the empty interior, she reasoned that something must have come out of it.
Finally, she drew the gun from its makeshift holster, clicked off the safety and aimed it at the building's decimated window, eyes scanning the shadows for any signs of movement within.
"Hey!" She called, usually firm voice wavering. "Come out here or you're dead!"
"You need to work on your taunts, C." Rosie smirked, but the younger girl only shot her a glare.
Regardless of how bad Caroline's taunts were, they seemed to do the trick. Out of the old building came rushing an alarmingly quick, bloodied and swollen man – with something fleshy and round attached to his head.
"What in the name of-!?" Rosie had barely got the words out before GLaDOS pushed them both out of the way, wrenched the gun from Caroline's hand and fired a single shot at the floundering gentleman, sending the fleshy attachment scurrying from his head and causing him to fall flat on his face, dead. The thing that scurried did its best to flee on its tiny legs, lifting two sharp appendages up into the air.
"It looks a bit like a crab." Rosie observed with amusement. The thing looked so pathetic that even GLaDOS found it a little amusing.
However, then it changed its course, heading back towards them – and leapt with a high-pitched squeal, aiming for GLaDOS' head.
Not expecting the movement, even she was caught unawares. The strange beast latched onto her face with surprising zeal – her only reply was a short-lived squeak.
"Shit!" Rosie came up behind the squirming android with a panicked expression and grabbed hold of the slimy creature, managing to wrench it from GLaDOS' head and toss it away. Despite how dishevelled the poor computer looked, she snarled and clicked the gun, shooting the fleshy crab not once, but three times in all – even though the first shot had been all it needed.
She seemed a bit stunned and her hair was a mess, but the crab hadn't managed to damage her. She was more interested in examining the curious crab before they moved on.
"It appears to be some sort of parasite," She confirmed, examining the tiny teeth which it had attempted to puncture her with. "I could feel it… 'sucking' on my head."
"So it feeds off of the brain of its host. That explains Rob Zombie over there," Rosie nodded to the corpse. "But what exactly is it? Is it even from this planet?"
GLaDOS used the mini scanner to do a few quick tests, before grunting in annoyance.
"Its DNA matches nothing found on this planet, and my scans show there is a 1% chance of it being an undiscovered Earth creature," She groaned. "I can only realistically assume it's an alien."
"An alien!? Similar to the Combine?" Caroline piped up, kneeling down beside her computer superior, examining the creature which moments ago had been attempting to latch onto GLaDOS' head.
"Perhaps – I couldn't say at this point in time."
"We should keep moving, in case if there's more of those things around." Rosie pointed out. As if it had been staged, there was an inhuman scream down one of the side streets nearby. It chilled Caroline to the core and the three hastily moved on, moving closer to the centre of the city.
The city centre was in such a state that Rosie took a moment to recognize it. Towering, glaring black structures dotted the streets, some lay vandalized while others still stood firm, blocking certain streets from their passing. Thick wires slithered from the alien structures around the pavements, suspended on ebony-coloured poles about the height of your typical lamp post. More cars were abandoned here than anywhere else they had been so far, some even upturned and stuck in sandy ditches where the worn tarmac had somehow been dug through. It looked like a huge pile-up had happened and everybody had just decided to abandon their cars rather than clean it all up. At first, the square they had come to looked to be totally deserted – but as they weaved their way through the maze of cars, they started to spot some very interesting, yet unnerving sights.
There were a lot of skeletons, most with small circular holes in the back of their skull. Many of them were collapsed over in such a manner that Caroline had to guess they had been running from something when killed. GLaDOS coldly stated that they had all been shot and Caroline's mind flashed to an image – she'd always had something of a mental image of the Combine, although she had never seen them before. She could see piercing cyan eyes of a shadowed, suited man – in one hand he held very tightly onto a plain black briefcase, and his other hand seemed to be glued to his dark red tie – then she realized that that looked nothing like the images of the Combine she usually had. Shaking her head free of the image, she curiously dragged GLaDOS over to one of the skeletons, still clad in the scraps of the clothing it had been wearing on the day of its death. GLaDOS, eyes aflame with interest, pointed to a small indent going across the skeleton's left shoulderblade.
"This human appears to have been physically struck before its death." She traced the bony ridge with her finger, before standing up, disinterested – but Caroline lingered there for a moment longer, staring into the hole in the back of the skeleton's head – she wondered what thoughts had lay there once – were they like hers? Or was this person more serious and mature, like Rosie? Or maybe even a complete asshole, like Eric. She smirked at the thought, gave the skeleton a nod (why, she couldn't be certain) and stood up to join the others.
Luckily, the path Rosie recommended for them appeared to have no alien blockages so they were able to get out of the exposed square before something spotted them – and there were certainly somethings about. In order to preserve the humans' calm states of mind, GLaDOS refrained from telling them that there were actually human-shaped signatures all around her, within the buildings. Judging by their oversized heads, they were the same as that foolish man who had attacked them earlier – mindless, with an unnamed alien crab sucking out what little cognitive functions they had possessed in life. Whatever the Combine had done here, GLaDOS concluded, was enough to put anything she could come up with to shame – for now, at least. Maybe they could teach her a few things about human torture. Then, she would kill them. She smirked away to herself – she liked the sound of that already.
Well, there you have it. I'm sorry if this chapter comes across as quite short - it is very small compared to other chapters of this story, but that's in preparation for the next chapter which is going to be where this story REALLY begins, so look forward to it! Thank you for all your patience, I promise you shall be rewarded! XD
~Lagiacrus