The road was empty, the land outside the small city desolate. John had played around with the radio controls, getting only static and emergency signals from decades past. Chell just focused on the road in front of her and the obstacles ahead; occasionally the way was blocked by debris, or, in one case, a dead alien so gigantic they had to go off the road to get around it. All Chell knew is that she most certainly wouldn't want to run into that thing alive anytime soon. As she drove past the head almost stared up at her, sharp fangs just poking out of a gaping jaw.

"Striders." John said under his breath. They drove straight past and didn't look back. But other than that, they didn't see anything interesting.

John tracked their progress on a map looted from a convenience store in the city. They turned south to begin with, just to get out of the peninsula that was Michigan and then headed east. Something inside chell told her to head towards the little dot labeled New York City, even though the name was quite unassuming and she couldn't remember exactly why she wanted to go there.

Nevertheless, the unlikely pair went along with relative harmony. When they ran out of food, or batteries, or any other supplies they went into houses or shops and looted. Any aliens they came across were quickly dispatched with extreme prejudice, and none stood a chance against both the test subject and the vortigaunt.

Going was slow. They could rarely push past twenty miles per hour for fear of either hitting a sudden obstacle or destroying the engine on the decades old truck they were driving. Debris and neglect turned the highway into something resembling an off road course, and every large bump and shake made Chell wince. There were few cars to steal outside of towns and cities and even fewer still which could carry the sheer amount of stuff this pickup could.

They went through cities and small towns, forest and plain. Over rivers and through mountains.

And no matter where they went, the only common denominators were headcrabs and desolation. Occasionally they would come across the body of something larger, but they looked to be dead for a while.

And as many alien bodies they found, there were twice as many humans.

Chell started to unconsciously slow down before driving into a town, just from fear of what they would find this time. Every town and house and store hid another grisly sight. Bodies seemed to be everywhere, some with their chest split to reveal their guts, some decapitated and arranged in elaborate poses, as if the combine or whoever else had passed through here had a horrible sense of humor.

The two unlikely companions often roasted one a head crab or two buggers over a campfire and had what Chell had labeled 'mind charades'. In which Chell could just think of a topic or a question or a response to something that John had said, and the alien either responded in return or failed to understand, resulting in several minutes of wild pantomiming in order to make herself understood.

It was fun and sometimes funny, and as Chell interacted and bonded closely with this other living, breathing, and sentient being she could free some of her memories coming back. Slowly, but progress was there all the same.

She could remember a warm hug that might have been her father, and a sensation of being comforted after she cried as Anna had comforted Tucker when he broke down. Sometimes these little flashes of her previous life would come while trying to talk to John. He would look at her strangely and move away for a little while, like he knew that these few glimpses into her previous life were sacred.

But all in all, from what Chell understood of road trips, this one was fairly normal.

Until they ran into their first Combine stronghold.

It was late in the day when the road Chell and John had been driving along reached a dead end, a bridge that was broken clean in the middle. Both Chell and John exited the car and looked around. There wasn't anything more here than there was in the rest of the business districts they had gone through to get here. Just a deserted shop and a bunch of foliage.

Chell's stomach growled. She walked over to the closed business, hoping for a restaurant or supermarket, but instead finding a store so looted that she couldn't even tell what it was originally supposed to be.

"Chell." John called out from across the way. She quickly ran over to the alien and saw him pointing off into the distance. She aligned her gaze with his and saw, off in the distance, a cloud of smoke.

Chell's heart started to beat faster in her chest, and a smile grew on her face. People! Actual, honest to god, sentient beings were here.

But the way towards the smoke was impassable. Chell looked back at the truck and then at the broken bridge. She began to pace back and forth, doing simple calculations in her head, the type of which she hadn't had to do since she had escaped aperture science.

Speed, weight, time, inertia. . .

Chell licked her finger and stuck it up in the sir to get a general idea of the wind speed. With one more hard glare at the broken bridge, Chell decided it could work and ran to the truck. She began frantically unloading supplies out of the bed, chucking pretty much everything except ammo and what little gas they had left.

John walked slowly over to her, cautious around his seemingly insane partner.

"What is the Chell doing?" her asked slowly.

Chell turned around, smiling and pantomimed driving. She pointed to the bridge and then signaled going over it. The vortigaunt, having communicated with her this way for a while now, got what she was saying almost immediately. And then put up a protest.

"She does not think this one is coming as well?"

Chell nodded as she lugged a gas can out of the bed.

"A quick death is all the Chell will gain from this endeavor."

Chell waved his concerns away and began to fill up the gas tank.

"We are uncertain this is not enemy territory."

Chell topped off the gas tank and gave John a serious look. She nodded, as if to say 'Good. I hope its enemy territory.'

John quietly gave up and wondered when he became so good at looking into the human mind.

He got in the passenger side of the car and Chell the driver's side. Chell turned the old beast of a car on and put it in reverse. They backed up until they hit the last intersection and then switched gears.

Chell and John looked at each other for a second, Chell with a wild excitement and John with both confusion and trust. Chell took a deep breath and hit the pedal, pushing the car as fast as it could go. 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 65, the speed just kept increasing, until they once again passed the store and suddenly were on the bridge. And then, the two of them were free in the air.

It felt like her gut had moved into her chest, and John let out an incredibly interesting sound that was halfway in between a scream and a moan.

And then, all too quick and all too slow the jump was over and they were headed down the road on the other side. Chell stopped the car and took a few deep breaths. She felt like she had just run a mile. John was shaking in the passenger seat.

"That one," the vortigaunt said "will never do something similar to this again."

Chell brought out a memo pad and pencil stored in the truck's glove compartment and scribbled something down. John turned to read it.

I make no promises

John released something like a sigh and performed a gesture that could only be referred to as a face palm.

Chell smiled and began to drive towards the source of the smoke.

And for a while they drove through the ruined city in quiet. But as they turned a corner to the street that was inhabited, a shot rang out across the city and their windshield cracked. Chell's mind froze up, but her instincts were good and they told her to get out of the car and out of sight. She ran out of the street and ducked behind a building. She could see John doing the same one the other side of the road.

John was hiding behind a dumpster, but was still being shot at every so often. They made eye contact and he gestured up towards the top of a building on the left of her. Chell craned her head upwards and barely saw something lying prone on the rooftop. John had a better view, but Chell thought he must have pretty good eyes to see the sniper.

He had spotted the person and now it was Chell's job to take them out. But she had left her rifle in the car!

Chell almost felt like smacking herself. You never left your gun behind! Ever!

She supposed that she had grown complacent during the past few weeks of quiet. She made a mental promise to herself right then that she would never be caught without a gun from now on, but that wouldn't help anything if she didn't survive this encounter.

Chell searched around for anything useful, and eventually found a fairly long piece of PVC pipe. It had a good weight in her hands, and was better than nothing. If she swung hard enough she figured she could knock someone unconscious. And if it wasn't too unwieldy, she could take the sniper's gun.

Chell ran around to the back of the building and found a door that had half broken off its hinges, like someone strong had come and kicked it down. She pushed it aside and carefully entered the place. Gunshots rang out intermittently from the rooftop, but even when the noise stopped her heelsprings cushioned and silenced her footsteps.

She made her way up and up and up, each level bringing her closer and closer until she reached the roof. There was no actual doorway to the rooftop, but a piece of the ceiling had collapsed and a ladder had been leaned up against the remaining bits, leading on top of the building.

Chell could see the figure on the edge clearly now. He- for she could now see it was a human male- was wearing some sort of army uniform and was speaking a language she couldn't decipher. He was focusing his attention downwards towards John, and seemingly wasn't worried about the other person who had gotten out of the car.

That is, until it was too late.

Chell brought down her pipe hard on his head and kept whacking him until she was sure he was down. She flipped over his body to find an immovable mask covering his face. It was creepy, and even though she knew he was unresponsive it still felt like he was staring at her. This, she thought, must be the combine. It was just as Anna and Leonard had described them. So, she did the only sensible thing and chucked his body over the edge. He hit the street with a splat.

Chell was busy inspecting the gun when she saw John run out of hiding and over to her side. She concluded that the gun was too big to carry around and descended the ladder and stairs, meeting up with John at the bottom. He handed her a gun, and Chell slung it over her shoulder, feeling much safer now that she had a weapon.

They moved down the street slowly and cautiously, abandoning their truck altogether and moving on foot until they finally reached their destination.

The building the smoke emerged from was labeled by fading a broken letters as the David L. Lawrence convention center. And standing guard in front of it were two combine soldiers with assault rifles. Chell checked to see that her gun was reloaded and quivered with anticipation. Next to her John nodded.

Oh yes.

This was going to be good.