Lauren could hear the TVs flitting through her brain when she tried to open the door to the outside. Mostly Breen—the same message over and over, how humanity needed this fate, generic Quisling bull; she'd heard it so many times she could recite it in her sleep. Her hands slipped over the brass knob like they'd been greased.
One or two of the voices was a news report, talking about how Black Mesa had been nuked, and then about the strange things that were appearing in major cities around the world and then going black, repeating ad nauseum. The more she struggled to open the door, the harder the voices pressed in, until she felt herself pop and wake up in a marching procession.
Seemed a clichéd setting for a dream.
It felt like she always had this one, walking with people who looked exactly like her towards something they couldn't see. Marching over glass, feeling it imbed in the skin but no pain.
Somebody tapped her shoulder and she turned, trying hard to recognize the face.
She couldn't.
She picked up her gun and started to kill as many of them as she could.
When Lauren woke up with a shattered gasp, Pen was gone.
That little fact made her sit straight upright, through drug-like REM paralysis and protesting ligaments. She hated waking up, she hated it so much. Ribby flopped off where he'd settled on her stomach, chirping in alarm. There was no sunlight yet, which made her suspect that she'd only been asleep for a few hours. So where was Pen?
Trembling a little, she cautiously got to her feet. The heater was off. Should she call out? Maybe she was just in the next room getting some water or something…
Don't be stupid, Lauren. Always assume the worst. Best option in the cities when people went missing. Of course, that involved accepting it and doing nothing about it. Which was not something she was doing here.
A large crash came from somewhere in the complex.
Panic time, panic time.
Where was her gun? Had she dropped it when they got out of the tunnel? Damn it, why didn't she keep track of her things? Her eyes scanned the room, and she eventually settled for a jagged piece of debris. It probably wasn't going to be much use, and unless she was going to deal with anything that caused knee-jerk reactions like zombies she might not have the nerve to stab anything with it, but it filled the empty space in her hand and that should be enough to stop the hyperventilating so that whatever it was wouldn't hear her breathing and speaking of breathing…
She needed to stop muttering her thoughts under her breath.
Blearily, concerned that she wasn't going to get any more sleep, Lauren crept down the hallway. Her attempt at covert caution was a little dampened by the little slap slap slap of Ribby hopping along the linoleum floor.
Maybe she should rethink this pet thing. "Scoot, Ribs. I don't wanna step on ya."
He ignored her. She considered drop-kicking him. More crashes stole back her attention, and she picked up the pace. The complex was difficult to navigate, but the confusion was mitigated a little because of how easy it was to recognize the corpse configuration in each room. Eventually, she found herself in a lobby-like area, with Pen rifling through the bodies of Union soldiers, rifle in hand, and picking out small packs of ammo. She turned with a start, and relaxed when she saw Lauren.
"I'm sorry," she said, bending down to pick up a pistol at the feet of one of the dead rebels. "I thought you could use some sleep. And then I realized that this was an emergency, and I couldn't make my way back.
"Emergency?" Lauren's small bit of pride at being able to find her way around the building better than Pen died when she dropped the pistol that was tossed to her. "What is it? What's going on?"
"Bullsquids." Pen's expression was narrowed, concerned. "Security breech, I'm guessing. Leftover hole."
BULLsquids? "This is fantastic. We never had to deal with 'bullsquids' in the city," Lauren muttered.
"No," Pen conceded, "The Combine keeps away all pests. And those pesky human rights that everybody's complaining about."
"…Point taken."
"We're not as safe here as I thought. So I guess we need to start making plans now."
"Plans?"
"Any thoughts?"
Lauren froze while her brain attempted to reach reasoning functions above survival. "Okay…Can't stay here…I don't know how bad bullsquids are, but I don't think I'd be all that great at dealing with them. And there aren't any more apartments for you to blow up."
"Ha ha."
"And neither of us knows the area, so we'd be walking blind if we just decided to run, is that right?"
"…Not necessarily. The Re—" The door splintered open. What entered was, presumably, a bullsquid.
Such a name didn't seem to cover the monstrosity that charged at the both of them with a savage fury, but what else could you call a hunched, bipedal, spotted beast with a mass of tentacles in the front of its face?
"What is that?!"
"Weren't you listening? It's a—" The sound of Pen's rifle going off drowned out the next few seconds of noise. The bullsquid faltered for a moment, then roared and started to charge, yellow goo leaking from its side. Lauren yelped and jumped back, frantically trying to aim and blasting off a round. Somehow, the bullet snapped into its eye, and the creature flopped down, dead. Maybe she was a crackshot or just lucky. It slid into Pen's feet with the remainder of its momentum.
"Oh, um, good, you got it. Let's go. I have an idea."
Pen led the way, swiftly but edged with caution. Lauren followed, checking her gun as best she could.
…Yep, this was a gun all right.
"Will I be able to hear this idea?" she said after a minute of plodding through corridors and listening for the crash of hunting cephela-cattle.
Pen glanced back. "As soon as I figure out how to find the exit we went through yesterday. Y'know, this building is a lot bigger than it seemed when we first came in—"
"It's that way." Lauren pointed through a set of double doors, the windows broken on one of them. "I remember, because this is how the corpses were arranged when we first came in through the tunnel. It was practically a straight walk through to get outside."
"…Oh." Pen fidgeted. "Well, that's good thinking, Lauren."
That was a compliment. How does one usually react to compliments? "…Thank you?"
Thumping noises echoed from beyond the room, possibly from an adjacent hallway. They both riveted their attention to where it echoed in front of them, instead of behind them where another bullsquid came roaring out of the vents.
Pen turned around first, and wrenched Lauren around by the shoulder. It looked at them somewhat expectantly, like one of them was just going to go jumping inside its mouth. They both fired on it and the thing went down quickly, peppered full of holes. Then the other one came out from the direction they'd been looking at and hocked a loogie at them.
Lauren had enough alien horror movie knowledge acumulated to know when to duck. It missed them both and splattered harmlessly over the floor behind them.
Harmlessly. Yeah. She had to look when it started sizzling. The goo was eating through one of the mannequin corpses.
Acid. These things spat ACID. It was green and smelled like laser gum surgery as it began on the floor, and given how that's where she'd been standing a moment ago they weren't bad at aiming it, either.
Kneejerk reaction time. Her pistol jammed as she brought it up to bear, the lack of recoil stiffening her arm. The bullsquid advanced, probably angry about having its life threatened in such a manner because it had dignity dammit and—
She whacked it with the gun, and surprised herself by drawing the yellow blood from its thick hide. The thing howled in pain and thrashed against her, smacking her diaphragm and forcing all of the air out of her lungs. Lauren responded with choked gasps, and Pen responded with a high caliber shot to its eyeball.
"Pen, you're a real crackshot." She managed, fiddling with the faulty gun.
Pen gave her that look again. "I'm a what?"
"It—never mind, let's get going."
Not wanting to push her luck in case more came along, she gripped her pistol tight with one hand and scooped fear struck Ribby into her arms with another. She didn't need either of them tripping over him when the running began.
Some wonderful idiot left a roofless jeep outside that anybody could just jump in and hotwire. Lauren felt a small twinge of pride that that particular skill belonged to her, although when it came down to it Pen had the steadier hand at driving the thing. After a few minutes of exhilaration she realized that this was the first time she'd been in a proper car in years, and grinned at the vaguely wooded, hilly scenery that was passing by at the perfect, blurry rate. She squeezed Ribby to her chest, and he panicked just a little bit more, trying to squirm out of her grip.
"This is fun."
Pen didn't take her eyes off the road. "You have a strange idea of fun."
"It's driving, there's nothing weird about driving."
"I think it's weird."
Lauren forced a scowl and looked around at the scenery. "…You're a better driver than I was at your age."
"Oh yeah?" Pen swerved a bit sharply around a passing houndeye, throwing Lauren into the side door.
"RUDE."
"You sound really tired," she laughed. "Look, you can sleep in the seat if you want, I promise I'll try to drive smoothly."
"M'kay." Maybe when she woke up, she'd be in another apartment. Third-ish day on the run and things were finally starting to make some semblance of sense to her. "Just let me know when we—"
The ground exploded under them and almost sent the car into a careening tumble. Pen screamed and Lauren almost fell out, clutching at the seat and looking around wildly. The teen quickly reoriented the jeep, getting all four wheels back on the dirt road's surface and slamming her foot down on the break.
The air was quiet for about a minute. "Was that a mine, or are we being shot at?"
Lauren coughed and said, sounding more confused than plagued with the stark terror driving away her tiredness. "What the hell is that thing in the sky, Pen?"
She immediately started the jeep up again, throwing herself around in the seat as if that would make the car move faster. "Come on, come on, come on…"
The only synths that really ever came through the city were Striders, although Lauren sometimes saw the drop-ships hovering overhead. The bizarre mashing of flesh and machine, though she'd never thought of them as anything other than the threats they were meant to be. This one hummed and looked like a giant, green bug in the sky with an industrial fan in its tail, lazily floating along as it lined up the gun on its belly at the small dot that was their jeep.
"Peeeeen…."
For a moment, she thought the right tire had exploded in a ball of fire, but as they careened through the flying dirt their speed didn't drop. Ribby wriggled down from her arms and burrowed under the seat, screeching through the slight ringing in her ears. What if she got some kind of hearing damage from all of this?
Pen cursed and floored the accelerator. "Munitions. In the trunk. Now, Lauren!"
"Right, right." She turned around and crawled to the back, getting another glimpse of the synth in the air, a bit of its glowing blue underbelly visible as it bore down on them. "But, uh, I don't know what kinda guns can handle that." There was an old tree near the path, standing tall like some proud survivor of a genocide, or stubborn remnant of an exodus, the leaves starting to crinkle and brown. It exploded as they passed by. "Honestly, unless what we have is some kind of bazooka—"
Oh.
"Did—did you know there was a rocket launcher in here?"
"Lauren just fire it, this thing can kill us very easily."
She caught the next missile whistling in her ears before it whizzed right by her nose and hit a few feet from the path.
"More more more more more, always more," she grumbled, scrabbling for the gun and grunting as the car bounced and socked her in the stomach. Her head twisted and she caught view of some ruins, what looked like an old town that had been destroyed for some reason or another. "Ahhhhhhh, Pen, cover-turn right."
"I know how to drive!"
When the jeep swerved the rocket launcher slid from her fingers and fell back into its case. The thing was heavy. She snarled and tried again as they slowed, maneuvering through the debris and structural skeletons of old buildings. As the bug started firing again she started getting showered with plaster and almost received a severe head wound as a chunk of brick fell past. An old church got in the crossfire, and the sound of its bell falling was the most glorious noise she'd ever heard. Lauren loaded the ammo and balanced the gun on her shoulder.
"How do I aim this thi-?"
"Scope, scope, SCOPE." The monster started changing tack, switching to machinegun fire while they were in the maze of cover to avoid wasting the heavy ammo. A few bullets pinged along the car, denting the metal and putting the final nail in the paintjob's coffin.
It was hard to aim while they were on the move. She took a minute to line up the red dot in the center of her vision with the creature in the sky, took in a big breath to steady herself, and fired
The recoil actually wasn't as bad as she'd been expecting from her experience with the shotgun, but of course, that was because a massive wave of fire shot out the end in its place. Thankfully it had been aimed out the edge of the car and not at Pen, or her friend would have ended up a pile of charcoal. Would have been nice to know that little detail beforehand. A moment passed and she stopped laughing in a mix of fear and exhilaration from firing off a rocket, and she watched as the bug gazed at it like it was an annoying bug and blasted it to pieces before it hit its mark
"Damn it." She scrambled to reload, Pen taking the brokenly paved street out of what was once a downtown and into a vaguely wooded area. Trees started falling as they dropped in and out of visibility, though they never lost sight of the synth. "Okay, let's try this again…"
The heat rolled away from her in a thick cloud, and she watched the little rocket speed toward its target again. Her breath caught, the gun in the synth's belly visibly warming up and the head turning as it drifted away from it, more a question of how fast either one was and how well such a war amateur could actually aim—
"Ohmygod I HIT IT I HIT IT!" She let out a loud whoop of excitement as the bug staggered in its flight path, small bursts of fire from where the rocket had struck its casing and cracked it. She turned back and shared a smile with Pen, before the ground in front of them burst into a cloud of dirt and rocky shrapnel, cracking the windshield and breaking a rearview mirror clear off. It was still alive and it was still firing.
Lauren went for another rocket and realized that she'd dropped the launcher, and it had fallen into the back of the truck for Ribby to start glomming onto it, eye wavering with fear. She bit her lip and gave him an affectionate, hopefully comforting squeeze with her hands, and he relaxed enough for her to start fumbling with her weapon again.
The missiles seemed to be coming at a faster rate as they slowly ran out of trees to hide behind while they progressed on the path, but they broke open before even reaching the ground. If it wasn't for their more advanced speed without as much to move around, they probably would have been killed by the raining shrapnel and concussive fire. It was hard to aim while you were curling up into a ball at every blast.
Steeling her nerve, while Pen started to cuss in some vocabulary that she didn't even know the girl had, Lauren reared the gun back and tried to align the dot with the erratically flying, firing green alien while crouching on the backseat floor.
It started to crack and burst in flames, falling off its path and crashing through maybe a hundred yards of trees, out of sight. Threat gone, Pen spun the car and ground it to a halt, face splitting with a grin and giving her a nod. "Nice shot, Lauren!"
Lauren frowned and stared at where it had been in the air. "I didn't fire that. Did it just explode? All of a sudden? That's anticlimactic. Really really anticlimactic."
Pen shook her head. "No, no, Combine gunships don't just explode after one rocket. It usually takes, maybe, three? If you didn't—"
"Well, hey there ladies!" Lauren's stomach dropped. The two of them turned to see where the car had stopped, and they saw a couple of men in a battered, tan truck, bazooka slung across the side as if they were trying to say, "Yeah, that's right, we did that."
One of them, wearing combat fatigues and a smarmy grin hopped out of their truck like it was a shiny red convertible and kicked a boot back to hit the door before striding over to where they sat in the jeep. "Aren't you two lucky we happened to be in the area?"
With this encroaching, familiar feeling of doom, Lauren figured there was some kind of luck involved.
Bear with me-this chapter is newly written, and hasn't gone through the first revision yet.