Chapter Text
He found a lever that said “Surface Access.” It sounded hopeful. The ache in his left arm was at the bottom of his pain list, far below the acid burns and broken ribs, but it reminded him of its existence as he tried to throw the lever without using any muscle above his shoulder. His right hand held the pistol and didn’t seem able to let go. Everywhere his eyes went, the barrel went too.
The lever went down, and the big rolling door went up.
Behind the door was a nice clean grey hall smelling of night-fresh desert air. No bloodstains, no aliens, no black char marks from teleportation discharge, no scuffs from military boots.
He eased through the rolling door and into the hall, gun up and waving, but the hall was clear and well-lit, wide open, silent; no cover, nothing to hide behind, but nothing hidden from him either. At a glance, he saw he was alone, but his mind wouldn’t accept it. Surely an alien was about to materialize behind him, or a soldier drop through the ceiling above him, or a-
Stop it, he told himself. He was too busy for paranoia and in too much pain to put up much of a fight if one was called for. Focus. Act on what’s under control, he thought, mentally walking himself through the basic laboratory setup exercise. A simple way to gather thoughts and start to frame an experiment when working with too many unknowns. Establish base parameters.
He was still breathing. Still walking. Had ammunition for the automatic, shotgun, handgun and revolver. Had three grenades and a claymore. Was in pain, yes, but wasn’t life-threatening. He had to keep telling himself that, because every time he took a breath and a step, the broken ribs sent his brain a signal that said he was in fact dying.
He ignored it like he ignored the suit’s constant blood loss detected refrain, set it aside in a box on a shelf to deal with later.
Establish variables. Move forward, choose direction. The hallway turned a corner and he eased around it, gun up. Nothing. More clear, empty well-lit space. It seemed to mock his caution. A door to his left, a dark opening.
A variable.
Anything might come out that door.
He unhooked a grenade, pulled the pin and was about to release and roll it in when he saw the glow of the med box on the far wall. He put the pin back.
He needed the med box. He needed it because he hurt and the pain was distracting him and damage to his physical systems was making him slow. And because he very, very much wanted the chemical distraction it promised. The opiates would give him mental distance from the three dead women and the punch of the sniper round, from the way the guard’s eyes had gone blank as the bullet passed through his skull. They’d give him relief from the tension in his shoulders and the twitching feeling of being watched, of the enemy about to attack from where he couldn’t see.
That’s what he told himself, as he wavered in the hall, facing the door. It wasn’t true chemical addiction, not yet. His body just craved the relief from physical pain and mental strain like anyone would. He could walk away but he couldn’t afford to. Not in his current state, not with his hands shaking and his breath shallow and short.
His flashlight didn’t make much of a dent in the dark room, not with his eyes narrowed for the bright hall fluorescents. Some crates on the wall, but pushed back against it. Ceiling whole. There would be a blind spot as he stepped through the door, though.
He hesitated. Variables. He couldn’t control the space, but he couldn’t control the pain forever either, nor the mounting paranoia threatening to trap him in a corner as it had trapped so many of his colleagues. He listened, counted to ten and heard nothing. So he counted to a hundred, and then stepped through.
As he turned to check the blind spot on his left, static caught his right side, traveled up the suit and burned flesh on his neck and ear. He dropped the gun as the discharge seized his muscles. It charred through the carbon knee and hip joints and his body went ridged, then collapsed when the discharge ceased.
He saw the med box, glowing faintly, the little red cross on it winking in and out as his vision failed. He tried to bring up his mental index of known enemy weapons. He tried to reach for a gun. He tried a lot of things but none of them worked. His hands spasmed and his breath hitched against the broken ribs.
Variables. Things he couldn’t control. He’d set up the experiment and this was the result.
Someone laughed.
---
“He’s still alive.”
“Good. Don’t let him die yet, it’s time for a little payback.”
“Long as I get my turn. He killed Jefferson, Tony and Smalls.”
“He’s killed a lot more than them. Man’s a mass murderer.”
“Is he still human?”
“We’ll open him up and find out. Nice and slow. Piece by piece.” The voice was low, gravelly, and iron hard, hard as the hands gripping his arms and the back of his neck, hard as the asphalt tearing into his limp knuckles as they dragged him.
He faded in and out, the suit softly chronicling his injuries. Three broken ribs, chemical burns, electrical burns on his neck, hip and knee, blood loss, head trauma. Head trauma was new, he thought abstractly. Wonder when that happened.
All about to be very irrelevant if the men in uniform had their way. His heart beat slowed and his body sagged in his captors’ hands. He’d done his part. He’d fought hard, a one-man army of bloodshed and destruction. He’d seen the sun, through human eyes, his mind and body intact, his gun arm steady. He’d taken out hundreds of parasites, bipeds, maggots and barnacles, and a few dozen overzealous soldiers as well. How was he to reconcile his vow to live with their orders to leave no survivors? Whose were the superior ethics, the government decree to contain the breach and risk no further outbreak, or the human drive to persevere against all odds, to claw success from death itself?
I am not a murderer, he thought. I am a physicist and I choose to live. The words were in red, underlined and circled, rewritten a dozen times in his mental lab notebook. But what good was intent, robbed of action? Wishing wouldn’t make the data.
A body at rest tends to stay at rest.
Darkness came and went. Static noise filled his ears, the voices fading like a bad connection behind the sound of the pain. His body fell limp on the ground, discarded. Someone kicked his broken ribs and he gasped and went rigid, seeing red.
“Bastard’s breathing.”
“Bring him here, I got the perfect end.”
“Want that suit off?”
“No time, we’re moving out. We’ll drop him on the way.”
“Man, I’d kill for a suit like that.”
“Wouldn’t we all. Brass is going to strip this place bare. They find more of that tech, all us alien hunters should be first in line.”
“You see how many bullets he took? I’d be invincible in one of these.”
They hauled him up, dragging him behind them. One hand on the collar, one hand under his armpit, wrenching the shoulder socket and grinding the chemical burns against the lining. He hissed again but didn’t have the energy to struggle. The suit was distraught at its lack of morphine and told him he was bleeding again, and that his blood pressure indicated possible internal trauma.
He didn’t scream.
Freeman hadn’t spoken aloud in almost thirty years. He had vague, distant memories of having a voice, but now wasn’t sure if those were his own true memories or something manufactured out of internalized media and other people’s narratives. Words never seemed to have much effect on his reality. Then he’d learned the path of research, of academia, where battles were fought on the printed page and reality determined by documented proof. Spoken word was redundant, a waste of time and energy. It meant nothing in his chosen sphere and he’d never missed it. Silence became his trademark, his protection against distraction and competition. He was well-published, well-respected in his research niche, liked his projects and with his reputation for efficiency, arrogance and disdain, no one bothered him anymore.
And thus, Freeman didn’t speak.
It was a law as deep as gravity.
“Beg, bastard,” the marine said.
He didn’t beg. Not when they put the gun to the bare patch of flesh below the hairline and just behind his right ear, tender from the electrical burns. But as the cold metal met skin, biology took over. Cold dread shot down his spine and he tried to arch away but his movement aggravated the broken ribs. Pain lanced through his chest and he gasped, trying to hold himself still.
"I think he likes it," the marine growled.
Freeman breathed slowly through clenched teeth. His vision returned and the deep internal stabbing receded from all-consuming to a background roar. Breathing hurt. Heartbeats hurt. His shoulder hurt. The gun barrel slid down the protective rubberized fabric of the suit collar, digging in to his neck. He closed his eyes and waited, breath shallow and heartbeat slow. How oddly fast the body surrendered, he thought. Control. He wouldn’t go out in a panic. He was man enough to accept the end of the line and he’d take the execution with body broken but dignity whole. His face and fingers were cold, all the blood draining inward, withdrawing.
“Through the spine, good and low. I want him alive in there.”
The gun moved down, clicking faintly over each overlapping plate of reinforced polymer armor. In the suit he shivered with the psychosomatic sensation of cold metal on bare flesh. It stopped on his lower back, just above his kidneys.
And then it fired.
He didn’t scream. Not when the impact drove white static across his eyes and a banshee shriek through his ears, not when they rolled his body over the edge and he fell twenty feet into the trash compactor, not when he breathed in the first breath of sun-warmed, rancid fumes.
Not when the warning sounded, and the walls began to contract.
“Damn, we gotta go.”
“I want to watch.”
“Boss says now, so we go now.”
“Don’t you want to see him pop?”
“Yes, but Gamma Squad’s pinned by some big alien tank thing. They’re being slaughtered. Move out!”
Steps receded, at the tap-tap dog trot of formation.
Freeman rolled over, gasping. He’d have retched if his back had let him. Instead, he just gulped for air. The suit had absorbed the shock and spread it, so he’d traded a shattered spine for a contusion from shoulders to hips and, by the nexus of pain in his lower back, the bullet had still penetrated. The suit helpfully informed him he had minor internal bleeding as well, where the force of the shot and fall had dislodged his broken ribs.
He rolled over again and onto his knees, his arms around his chest. The guns were gone, the crowbar was gone, the grenades and the extra protein bars and everything else was gone, except the suit and the flesh inside it.
His body hurt with every heartbeat, but he got up. He limped to the first crate and sat on it, then swung his legs up and levered himself onto the next crate. One by one, backwards first, careful of his ribs, trying not to bend or twist.
The walls inched inwards, metal screaming on metal, klaxon personnel warning droning on. Of course Black Mesa wouldn’t install a safety shutoff, that’d be too much work, and an insult to the clearly superior intellect of all their staff.
So he climbed, until he could see over the walls. Until he was sitting on the cement edge, until all limbs were out of the pit. The walls slammed shut beside him, grinding the crates to splinters.
He saw the crowbar five feet away and crawled on his belly to it. His hand gripped the hexagonal shaft and he closed his eyes, forehead against the rough, stained stinking concrete. They'd left it behind, thought it useless. Their mistake.
I choose to live.