We each stuffed at least twenty or more of these wafting disks into all of our packs.
Some would say that was excessive, but it was good insurance should we spill any if we had to make a quick getaway―something we were all rather intent on avoiding. After making sure our stolen treasures were zipped up safely, we began to exit the train. My telepathy was once again rendered useless by the dark metal alloy used around the carriage, so I had no way of knowing whether those workers were right outside on the platform right now making their way back to their engine, and the ambient hum of the train itself made it difficult to hear anything outside.
Nevertheless, our departure had to commence. We hadn't forgotten about the training grounds for new soldiers within this area, and we weren't particularly eager to meet them should we hang around for much longer. With our weapons unholstered and our bodies low to the ground, Nuri was the last one to hop out just after Sofia, and the loud, thunderous wail of the train's horn blasted across the valley, making us all jump, and puffing my tail up so suddenly it felt like my bands would snap.
René just barely managed to slide the carriage's door shut before the train began to speed off almost instantly, picking up tremendous speed in just several seconds. All we could do was wait and watch the long train sped by down the line, relieved that we all got off but also nervous at what might await us on the platform, for it was still obstructed by the moving train. Once the tail end of the train had finally sped away, our worst fears were unfortunately brought to life when three Combine soldiers appeared on the platform watching the train speed away.
These troopers were a little different from the ones I had fought in the depot; they had lightly armoured beige-coloured whole-body uniforms, almost looking more like rubberised hazard suits. Their white respiration masks had vibrant red striping on their brows, their optics glowed a bright blue, and they were holding what looked to be smaller variants of the pulse rifles I had seen. My friends had the instinct to freeze when they were revealed, but I perhaps was a bit too primed for a fight and jumped to a full stand with my staff deployed. My motion was noticed by one of the soldiers, and he instantly drew his weapon, followed by the other two.
"Alert! Anti-Citizens sighted!"
"Contain and suppress! Cauterizers active!"
I had the benefit of being ready first and conjured a wide shield around the whole party, generating a wall of blue transparent energy as the barrage of pulse fire failed to penetrate it. The others were taken aback by the show of magic I put on display, and Sofia made an opportunity of it. While the soldiers were still preoccupied with my shield, Sofia leapt out from its cover and fired up the soldiers with her assault rifle, killing all three of them as they collapsed to the ground.
"Run for it!" she cried.
"To the villas! Go!" Francis ordered further. My friends took off faster than LightFoots across the tracks as I followed behind, giving one last worried glance at the soldiers' bodies before leaving the station. I had heard that the optics inside their masks constantly recorded a live feed to Overwatch; I prayed that their footage of me was too blurry and underexposed to recognize me. I was already dead in the Combine's eyes and did not wish to endanger my friends by reigniting their critical priority of exterminating me.
Our sprint remained unceasing until we returned to the edge of the village, retreating into the shelter of one of the townhouses sitting adjacent to the overgrown field dividing the village from the train tracks.
Each of us was carrying about twenty extra pounds on our backs, which definitely put a strain on our endurances―some of us more than others. Pouring inside the old villa, Nuri played it safe by leading us inside and closing the door when he was the last person inside. He shoved his bloated back to the door and sighed in abrupt exhaustion.
"D'oh―no more easy pickings from this place ever again…" he wailed.
"How 'bout we cry later about it, 'aight hermano?" René insisted, leaning over with his hands on his knees. "I'm more worried about escaping with our lives. The Combine's not gonna turn a blind eye on those bimbos you shot up, Sof."
Sofia glared indignantly at him. "Oh lo seinto. ¡No interntaré salvaros el pellejo la próxima vez!"
"No soy un desagradecido. ¡Solo digo que probablemente debería haberme quedado en casa hoy!"
Both Sofia and René began to rant in this strange new language I had never heard before, which caught me by surprise a little. Francis would not tolerate such bickering and broke them up. "Zip it, you two!" he barked. "We need to keep moving. Reinforcements could be showing up at any moment."
We all did as Francis instructed and began pushing across the line of buildings we had wormed our way through to get to the station. We had just made it a little over the halfway point of our initial infiltration route when we began to hear a dreadful drowning sound off in the distance outside the building we were currently in. It was a sound I had not heard since my second day on Earth. A dropship was approaching.
The walls and ceiling shook with intensity as the dropship began to sound like it was flying overhead, passing over the house. It must have come from the barracks on the other end of town. "Shit…" Francis cursed, looking up desperately.
"We'll have to fight them off," I decreed, holding my shotgun abreast. An odd feeling told me that I would need it in a moment.
"Easier said than done, Ms Krystal; they'll never stop coming until they've killed us!" Nuri said fretfully, he out of the lot of us being the most afraid. While we were not currently next to any windows, I could hear the dropship descending to ground level outside, along with a distinctive pulsating howling sound that had to indicate that the troopers were jumping off, a premise confirmed after I picked up Combine chatter emerging from the psionic-resistant carrier.
"I'll head for the roof," I said, "they'll find me a more appealing target if I'm raining fire from above. The rest of you stay down here and pick them off if you can."
"I'll go with you," Sofia insisted, holding her rifle closer. "Everybody needs somebody watching their back out here."
I was a little hesitant, but coordinating chatter outside was now audible amidst the droning sound of the dropship, prompting me to act quickly. "Come on," I accepted, jerking my head towards the stairs before we both ran for them.
"You heard the psychic fox, people; find some cover!" Francis relayed to René and Nuri as me and Sofia ran up the stairs. This building had four floors―which must have been a small apartment building from the looks of it―so me and Sofia rushed our way up the circling flight of stairs with the determination to find roof access. If there wasn't any, I could easily climb through a window, but that would have been unfulfilling to Sofia if she wasn't as agile as me as I guessed she wouldn't be.
It's difficult to take notice of the finer details of your surroundings when you're trying to stave a massacre. Had I noticed all of the smashed furniture and the bloodstains along the walls further down the hall of the third floor, I would perhaps been a little more cautious going further, but my mind was too preoccupied with listening to the dispatched units outside who were now surrounding the building. With all of that taking up valuable telepathic bandwidth, that unfortunately prevented me from foreseeing what awaited us on the fourth floor.
I instantly spotted a mounted ladder on the wall at the far end of the hallway and was about to make a break for it, but something began to quickly drown out the cerebral background chatter in my mind as something much more horrible began to fill it. I barely made it past the first two rooms before something staggered out of the third room to my right, uttering muffled shrieks of agony of anguish.
I stopped dead in my tracks as a headcrab-mounted victim appeared right before me, and a telepathic assault on my mind ensued as I unwittingly consumed the thoughts of that poor human. The sight of it alone was pure nightmarish, and the psychotic torment it endured would have been shared with me had I not reflexively closed off my mind as tightly as I could, taking the lesson I learned at the rest stop in the mountains to heart when encountering one of these 'zombies'.
The zombie snarled helplessly as it trudged towards me, its mutated clawlike hands reaching out for me, making me shut my eyes before firing a powerful blast from my shotgun. Bodily fluid sprayed across my face as awaited the inevitable thud of the body falling over, but had my eyes been opened, I would have seen that I merely blew the zombie's arm off. It was still quite alive. Still very much in Hell.
"Zombie!" Sofia shouted as she finally made it up to the fourth floor, firing her rifle at first sight. Her aim was precise as the bullets flew past me before blowing the headcrab off its host. It was then the body finally fell and was rendered lifeless.
I just managed to crack my eyes open to see Sofia running up next to me. "Come on, let's move it!" she prompted, jumping over the body as she made her way to the ladder. Instead of listening to her and getting my head back in the game, all I did initially was wipe some of the blood off my face and look at it in my hand for a moment. It wasn't until I heard gunfire commencing downstairs did I remembered what was happening beyond this harrowing point.
It was when we blew up an entire petrol station did we finally caught a break.
Before that, though, I believe I and my caravan friends faired rather well in pushing up against these soldiers. My proposed-then-quickly-adopted strategy proved effective enough; I unleashed torrents of fireballs from my staff upon the soldiers from the rooftop, serving as their most desired target while the men down below picked them off while behind cover. Sofia was showing herself to be gifted with a rifle, as I did not witness one instance where she missed a target while up on the roof with me.
While we took care of the first wave with little turbulence, we did not have time to congratulate ourselves. We could not stay here. We had to flee the village as quickly as we could before the Combine had a chance to pursue us, but that would become less and less likely should we continue drawing attention to ourselves like this.
Francis, René, and Nuri continued to push on down the line of houses and buildings while Sofia scaled back down to join them. Being that we wanted to make as much of a clean exit as we could hope to achieve, we tried to remain within as much cover as we could. Breaking for the hills was not a wise choice if we wanted to leave ourselves open to some snipers should they be monitoring the dispatch site. Perhaps a grand diversion was in order here.
Losing the collective ability to cover ground quickly convinced me that we definitely needed a diversion to keep the Combine off of our tails. I considered conjuring illusions of ourselves running in the other direction but I wasn't confident that I was at the point where I could create animated illusions like that. I realised that maybe something more bombastic was in order here to quickly grab the Combine's attention if only just for a few generous moments.
I remembered that we would be passing an old petrol station down the road from where we entered the village about a hundred metres away. Without much else to lose, I spewed volleys of fireballs at the Northern Petrol Estación de Servicio once it returned to view, many of which landed directly on the old pumps. Anticipating anything to come of this other than nothing at all, I helped the others carry the injured René to the gates of the village just moments before an earth-shaking explosion going off behind us made some of us tremble, and the others topple over like Francis, Nuri, and René, accompanied by a bright orange light that dissipated as quickly as it flashed.
While the enormous cloud of fire and smoke I created was quite the spectacle in its own right, I did not stop to admire it as I continued attending to my friends and making sure they were hobbling to safety. Sofia and I kept a close guard as we left the village border and returned to the rocky cover of the hillside that rounded the road leading to the village itself, where Nuri and Francis sought momentary refuge inside the ruins of a small barn of some kind that looked somewhat older than most of the buildings in the village.
I kept my telepathic senses on high alert as I listened and waited for Combine reinforcements to pursue us in spite of my ploy, but so far I sensed and heard nothing. We couldn't take for granted the new recruits' overall slow response time to contain us anti-citizens. Their inexperience would give us time if we took it.
"Oh~…" René moaned as he lay against the wall for a moment, holding his bloody leg which had since been cauterized, but hardly in any condition to be usable. "You people are crazy, you know that? Now we've got fewer plates…"
"If it means keeping you then it's worth it," Francis sighed, getting ready to heave him up again with Nuri's help.
Winded, but relieved, Sofia hung her arms and smiled wryly at her linguistic companion. "Apuesto a que ahora desearías tener pie de trinchera, ¿eh?"
"Tranquilizarse…" René grumbled as he got hoisted up, though he bore a smile as well. While I couldn't understand their words, I was able to telepathically assess that this was an in-joke of theirs involving something called trench foot.
Moments later, Francis and Nuri were hoisting René up again and hurried him along as quickly as they could back to the van which was parked a little ways down the road by the old generators, with the lot of us feeling lucky that we were able to come away with a good four backpack-worths of wafting disks in tow.
While remaining in the back of the party keeping watch, it was not long before I was able to spot a familiar figure looming by the gate of the village. The suited entity stood silently and ominously, holding a briefcase, and staring straight at me with those bright eyes that could be seen for miles. My lungs felt like they had shrivelled into raisins when I saw him again, but he did not stay for long.
All he did was smirk, adjust his tie a little, and turn and walk away out of sight. Ben was right; it looked like he was going to be keeping tabs on me after all. Just when I was finally feeling comfortable sleeping on planet Earth.