Chapter One:
Welcome to Black Mesa
William Fletcher
"Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system," a voice said above me. "This automated train is provided for the security and convenience of the Black Mesa Research Facility personnel. The time is nine thirty AM. Current topside temperature is ninety five degrees, with an estimated high of one hundred and five. The Black Mesa compound is maintained at a pleasant sixty eight degrees at all times. This train is inbound from level two dormitories to Sector C medical facilities," it went on as I tuned it out. I'd heard it every day for the last six years after all, enough times to practically memorize everything that was consistent. Anything else of importance was likely said at the beginning of the message after the weather report. With one earbud in and playing some slow jazz, I looked over and saw JD.
"Your son has brain cancer."
The words of the doctors still echoed in my ears from that terrible day. The day that JD had been born should have been one of celebration and rejoice, but the only things I felt when thinking back to it were sadness, and regret. Sadness for the one I'd lost, and regret for all the things we'd still had left to do together.
"Carol… has it been over six years already?" I mumbled, and JD looked up at me, confused. It was an all too familiar and heart wrenching sight. Brain cancer in a child was bad enough. I knew, I'd done the research after getting home with him from the hospital, without his mother. What made it worse was that none of the doctors in all of Montana seemed to have any idea what form the brain cancer had took. Hell, even in all of the US it seemed like there was no shot for my son to survive, and yet, by some miracle, he had. My stubborn little trooper had been toughing out his reality for six whole years and then some, even without his ability to barely speak or comprehend much of what I told him.
"Will… tell our son I loved him so very, very much…"
Those had been Carol's last words to me. I still remembered feeling her hand go slack in my own, the sight of her head falling back and her arm going limp. It felt like an eternity since I had met her, an eternity since I'd seen her face for the first time in college. With both of us having been undecided majors for two years, we'd finally decided to take up similar pursuits as park rangers in Yellowstone.
In our third year, we both dropped out. Not only had college been very expensive for our families, who didn't make much money anyway, but the information we were being taught just hadn't stuck with us very well. Then, one Christmas, I'd had an idea.
"Carol… Instead of going back to university, what if we went and applied with what we know now? You've told me on multiple occasions that you learn best in a hands on environment, and you know I do as well," I'd asked her in our apartment, bathed in the glow of the small, but still decorated Christmas tree. "Let's drive out to Yellowstone and see if they'd be willing to teach us there, what do you say?"
She had, of course, been eager at the idea, more so than even I had been. But with her being pregnant with JD at the time, they'd told her the most she could do would be to work as a park guide. Still, it was better than sitting in a classroom, and we were accepted as park employees in training. We were even given a small cabin on the reserve, just like the other workers, where we stayed so often we ended up ending payments on our apartment in the city.
I smiled fondly at JD, who was wearing my security guard ball cap and one of Carol's old bracelets on his wrist, once again being struck by a pang of regret. When we'd found out Carol was pregnant with him, before we even know if the baby would be a boy or a girl, we'd both decided that we'd want to go hunting with him, especially in Bitterroot Valley. It was always Carol's favorite place in all of Montana, even as far of a drive as it was from where we lived on the national park, and she'd wanted to show our baby it as soon as he was old enough. After my employment, he'd developed a habit of wanting to mimic me. Whether it was that he truly wanted to look like me, or because he was surrounded by all the other security guards in Sector C and wanted to fit in, I didn't know. But one way or another, he'd managed to get the message across that he wanted attire like mine. That was why at the Sector C white elephant gift exchange the previous year, the wife of one of the scientists, Azian Vance, had gifted us a pair of security guard resemblant clothing just for JD.
"Don't worry, kiddo. Just your old man talking to himself like a weirdo again," I reassured JD, resting my arm around his shoulder and pulling him close. "Don't worry about a thing. We'll get you all fixed up, and then I can show you all the things your mom and I used to love doing together."
The night that Carol woke me, I had no idea how quickly my world could shatter like fragile glass. But it had, just like a simple doll being thrown away into an incinerator. Arriving at the hospital, the doctors and nurses quickly ushered us away, before asking me to stand outside as the baby was delivered. But then, I'd heard panic come from the room Carol was in.
"What's going on?" I asked, pulling aside the curtains to see one of the doctors cradling my newborn son, the others crowded around my bloodied wife. She weakly reached out for me, told me she wanted to name the boy Jamison Dale Fletcher, after our two fathers, Jamison and Dale, who had both passed away to sickness a few years before we'd met at the music center on the Montana State University campus. They were, for both of us, really the only members of our immediate family whom we really got along well with. The others, though nice enough, were just really distant ever since we'd gone off to the university, before we'd met each other for the first time.
Everything happened so fast, like I was dreaming it all, but no matter how much I wanted it to be, it wasn't. It was real, my wife was dead in front of me, our baby still crying behind me. Slowly, I asked to see him, and I carried the boy home in my arms, still grappling with the new reality of my life.
After I'd returned, I saw that the other rangers and guides had gone to great lengths to welcome us back as parents, but when I got out of the car without Carol, my eyes streaked with tears, they knew something terrible had happened. The festivities stopped before they could begin, the cheerful music was never played, and the only thing I could do after that was solemnly walk to my cabin, holding JD's tiny body in my arms as I cried myself to sleep.
After that, my boss told me that I'd always be welcome to come visit or live there again, but that I needed to take time off and find an easier job so that I could take care of my son. As he was a father of five who'd remarried after he'd lost his first wife to a mass murderer back in the nineties, I knew he was right about that, so I looked around for a more simple job. As it turned out, someone else had heard of my search. A someone by the name of L.M., who had offered me a job at a secret facility in New Mexico called Black Mesa.
"A secret facility, huh? Well, if it's secret there probably won't be much going on, right? Sounds like just the kind of job that Doug said I should look for," I had thought to myself. After packing up mine and Carol's personal belongings, of which neither of us had much of, I called the facility back about the job, and said that I would accept it on one request. I was fine with having to stay onsite, and I knew I wouldn't be able to leave. It was a requirement for all personnel, given the research they were conducting. Once you saw what they were doing, you couldn't tell anyone. Sworn to secrecy and all that. I didn't mind. Aside from my dad, my family and I never talked much except over school breaks anyway.
I was more than happy to except the job offer, even dispite that stipulation. My one request, however, was that a portion of my pay went to the medical staff on site, in the hopes that with the bleeding edge technology they were working on, they might be able to find a cure for JD's brain cancer. It was actually right after his first appointment that I had found out that his so called brain cancer wasn't really brain cancer at all. The scientists didn't have a name for it, but they knew it wasn't cancerous, explaining that the doctors in Montana likely had called it that to take some of the sting off of the news for me. What they did have, however, was an experimental, and not even certain cure for it. It was better than nothing though, and I agreed to let them attempt to cure my son.
I was never told the specifics, but working as a security guard in the Sector C anomalous materials test labs, I'd heard snippets of conversation among the scientists, often times mentioning things like exotic matter and a so called border world they were calling 'Xen'. How they'd discovered it at all was way beyond me, way above my pay grade, and frankly more than I cared to know about. All I cared about was that apparently inside this place, they'd found some strange liquid with a restorative properties. The hope was that with periodic chemical baths in the liquid, JD's affliction might be eventually cured. Miraculously, it had worked, and since I'd started my job six years ago, JD had gone from being little more than what medical students would call a vegetable, to being able to do almost everything a normal six year old could. The only thing he still couldn't do was talk or think complex thoughts, but he could react to what I was saying and knew how to get my attention for basic things.
I shook myself out of my dreary thoughts as I realized that the the train had stopped moving. Even more strange, we were nowhere near the station platform, or any pickup stop for that matter. "Well, that's weird," I mused, standing up and resting a cautious hand on my sidearm at my hip. The lights above me flickered, and I realized that the automated transit system recording had also stopped playing.
"JD," I said, looking out the glass as strange green lights appeared out of nowhere. "Come here, and stick close to me."
Before the boy could do anything, however, there was an otherworldly sound behind me, and I whipped around to see the same strange green light at the opposite end of the tram car. "What the hell…" I cursed as the green glow faded, and in the flickering lights of the fluorescent lamps, I saw a creature that I had never seen before. The size of a turkey, it had bare skin and no eyes, with four long legs spreading out from it's body.
I slowly walked towards JD, who was staring at the creature curiously. In less than a second, it suddenly lunged towards us, and I instinctively brought my arm up to block it, years of muscle memory from my childhood martial arts classes coming into play in the blink of an eye. The creature shrieked and wrapped long, clawed appendages around my arm, and I could see a strange, beak like shape inside of its gaping mouth, about to bear down on my wrist.
I grunted in pain as the creature bit down on my arm, before pulling my sidearm out and pushing the barrel of the pistol into it's jaw. "Chew on this," I said, pulling the trigger once. There was a loud crack, and then the creature fell slack to the ground. But there was no time to celebrate, as my arm had begun to bleed, and badly too. I rested my sidearm back in its holster and pulled out my pocket sized first aid kit. With a few drops of the antibacterial solution, I wrapped my wound up in gauze and turned to JD. "You all right?"
His only response was a shaky arm pointing behind me. Narrowing my eyes, I looked in the direction he was pointing to see another strange creature outside the tram, almost humanoid in it's appearance, pulling green light to it's hands and then thrusting them forward toward the tram. I could barely blink before everything went black.
"Warning: unauthorized biological detected in lambda reactor."
I groaned as my eyes slowly opened, my head pounding as alarms rang out around and above me. "What… what happened…" I mumbled, trying to stand up. Strangely, I couldn't. Someone or something was pushing me down, preventing me from getting to my feet. As I looked around for a way to free myself, I saw JD's body underneath mine, and everything came flooding back.
"JD? Hey, JD, can you hear me?" I frantically asked, relieved when I saw his confused eyes open and stare at me. "Oh, thank God you're all right," I said, before spotting a slightly rusted crowbar off to the side just out of reach, illuminated by flashing red lights. "Hey, JD, I need your help here. Can you move?"
Miraculously, he nodded, and I pointed to the crowbar with one hand. "Okay, I need you to grab that crowbar, and jam it into the debris on top of me. Then, use all of your strength to push it down as hard as you can. Just like how Dr. Knewon showed you to move that seesaw, remember?" I asked. The boy silently nodded and wormed his way free from the wreckage of the tram, picking up the crowbar that was almost a third of his height. "That's it, bring it over here, and slide the bottom end in."
JD followed my instructions to the letter, pushing the crowbar in close to my head. "Now push down on it as hard as you can!" I told him, coughing into my one free arm. JD pulled down on it, and though the debris started to move, it wasn't quite enough for me to get free.
Suddenly, another person stepped in and pushed down with JD. With the extra force, I was able to crawl out of the rubble of the destroyed tram and stand up, coming face to face with my rescuer as the rusted crowbar broke in the middle.
"Well, you sure are a sight for sore eyes, boss," I said, shaking my security captain's hand. "Thanks for helping JD get me out of there.
My boss, a mid thirties man named Jack Lowery, was one of the higher ranking security officers in the Sector C arm of the Black Mesa Security Team. He was also one of my first friends after JD and I moved to the facility, even going so far as to invite me and my son to dinner with some of his friends from the security force.
"Come on buddy, didn't they ever teach you not to ride the elevator in the middle of an emergency?" he asked with a grin.
"Yeah, well I didn't think that'd apply to trains as well," I replied, checking to make sure that my sidearm was still in its holster, which it was. I pulled it out and looked around the partially collapsed transit tunnel. More red lights kept it faintly illuminated, but it was enough light to see that at least the part of the facility I was in was in bad shape.
"Guess it does. You both holding up okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, aside from probably being sore for a few days, and JD looks clean too. You got any idea what's going on?"
Jack shook his head. "Wish I did. Otis sent me a donut for my birthday that I was in the process of eating when this weird crab-thing just appeared in my office."
I nodded, showing him my bandaged hand. "Same thing happened on the train. It try to take a bite out of you or your snack?"
"Yeah. Went for me head, but I managed to get it off course with a clipboard. What did you do with yours, try to punch it?"
"Bullet through the mouth, but it definitely wanted to snack on me and JD. You got a plan?"
"A couple. You and JD stick tight to me, I'll fill you in on what little I know while we walk."
A/N: Cue the music Valve, we got another story to tell in Black Mesa!
I took quite a few different approaches with this story. First off, the main character Will is significantly older, old enough to have a kid even. But even more obvious, I'm telling this fic from his personal perspective, instead of a third person perspective! Not sure how this'll affect the read, but I hope you enjoy the change as I add yet another unfinished fic to the pile! (I really am just giving myself a bunch of work. Eh, at least there's no due date beyond "before I forget about my Fanfiction account.)