H λ L F - L I F E: Bishop's War✔️

CHλPTER 02: Zero Hour

Back on the tram again.

Though this time around, Eric felt distinctly uncomfortable. He at least knew why: his routine, which had been set practically in stone after two long years of same crap, different day, had been broken very suddenly. He was sure this had happened before, but he couldn't remember when. Certainly not within the past few months, probably not within the last year. Maybe it hadn't happened before.

He was missing things that were important to him: his armor, his sidearm, his radio. Two magazines of nine millimeter ammo. (Two spares was the most they allowed him to carry.) He kept clenching and releasing his fists, anxious and vaguely upset. He supposed it was because he'd spent so long carrying a weapon that being without one felt wrong. Not that he'd actually had to use one outside of a combat situation. He'd never been mugged, never encountered some lunatic with a gun, nothing like that.

But being prepared for such an eventuality felt right to him. Or maybe just being unarmed made him feel vulnerable, and he hated that feeling. So, to help calm himself, he began going over the steps in his mind. Once the tram finally got to where it was going, he'd get out and hunt down a toolkit. They were placed at fairly regular intervals, although if the person in question had remembered to return them, or if anyone had checked them to see that all the tools and spare parts were there was a complete coin flip.

From there, he'd track down the problematic power short. It should be pretty easy. Stuff in Black Mesa was old and, as a result, a bit showy. In other words: when stuff broke, it tended to spark and crackle, making it quite easy to find. Doubly so if it was related to power. The mad scientists running this place were always doing too much with too little, putting a strain on the various systems that helped keep the research complex running. It was why they employed a small army of technicians and engineers.

This wasn't the first time he'd been tapped to make repairs by a long shot. It probably happened twice a month on average. He'd put on his resume that he had some basic technical knowledge to try and stack the deck in his favor as much as possible. He wasn't lying, but he didn't realize that it meant he'd be sent off into dark, decrepit maintenance tunnels and ancient storerooms that no one had been in for a decade.

But of course he should have seen that coming.

A basic rule of capitalism: people will attempted to squeeze the absolute maximum amount of work out of you while investing the absolute minimum of resources into you. Although really that was just a basic rule of the human condition it seemed. It was probably why he'd make a terrible boss: he didn't have that lack of empathy required to slave-drive people. He sighed. All these unhappy thoughts. Why couldn't he be a regular twenty-something and not be having an existential crisis? Or was that normal and he just didn't know it?

The tram grinded slowly to a halt, mercifully jarring him from his thoughts and forcing him to act. Action typically helped soothe his frayed nerves. He got up and stepped off the tram, onto another one of those mesh-metal platforms he was so familiar with by now. Marching across it, he stepped over the threshold and through a doorway cut into a concrete wall. Here he came to an antechamber with concrete tunnels snaking away from it in three directions. There was a small maintenance closet tucked away into the right corner, between the front wall and the tunnel there, and he opened up the door and slipped inside.

He flicked on the lights.

It was a cramped room, packed with shelves stuffed with random things. There was an old ladder at the back and he found himself curious about where it led. Moving forward, he came to stand before the ladder and peered up into the hole it disappeared into. Here was a tunnel carved in the concrete, ascending and quickly giving way to darkness. A little frustrated, he hunted around for a moment and found a flashlight (and the toolkit he'd need) attached to the wall, snagged it and returned to the hole. He turned it on and looked back up.