Physics of the Crowbar

Hostile Healing

He crawled through a ventilation shaft and dropped into the empty hallway beyond. Something chittered and he raised the crowbar defensively, but the parasite had found easier prey. He watched through the glass in fascinated horror as one parasite distracted a curious scientist while another crept up behind and leapt. It settled onto the man's head, engulfing the cranium in seconds. Barely a minute later and the man was a brainless puppet. He'd succumbed without protest, without a fight. Dead, without falling.

The hall swam before him. They were intelligent, capable of working together. More than animals, they were vicious enemies. Did they see humans as the unthinking beasts, or did they know they were destroying fellow intelligent life?

Something moaned behind him and he spun. In the darkened lab, a puppet twitched, groaned and stood. He slammed the crowbar down into the soft tissue again and again. The man under the alien writhed with each hit, fingers reaching for him even as the body failed and fell.

He turned away, disgusted and relieved- how many had he killed now? Three? Four? One less to follow him, one less monster to worry about.

Around the corner the bodies of a security guard and a parasitized scientist lay entangled on the floor, blood and fluid pooled around them. He looked away, not wanting to recognize the guard. What use were they, if they couldn't even shoot the creatures?

No. He shoved the despair down and turned back to the guard. In the gristly pile the gun lay mostly empty. Its casing was greasy with blood but he picked it up and inspected it. Five bullets left in the clip. The crowbar was still comfortingly heavy, but now he could kill something before it came into grabbing range.

He crawled through the next set of broken security doors. His own unit was now well behind him, but as long as he kept traveling up he was sure to come out somewhere in the upper Black Mesa complex.

Then green lightning flashed in front of him. He threw himself back, memories of the resonance cascade flooding back, but no- this small tear in reality only deposited a four-legged green-flanked bulbous many-eyed thing on the floor before sputtering out.

It chittered rhythmically, then sent a blast of sound and force in his direction. He dove for what cover the broken security doors offered and wasted three bullets bringing it down. The maggot-like body writhed twice and leaked green ichor.

Maybe a biologist could tell him why everything was trying to kill him. Or maybe they'd opened a wormhole into some intergalactic battlefield. He didn't know. He didn't care. He'd never fired on a living target before. Somehow the sense of accomplishment with the gun was different, more mature, than with the crowbar. The crowbar was an intimate weapon, the gun impersonal and advanced.

To kill with the club of the dark ages or the bullet of modernity, which is the more human?

A human voice thanked him. A white-haired scientist, not one he recognized, cowered in the corner. Gore splattered the man's wrinkled face. The scientist wrung his blue-veined hands and sobbed his thanks at the rescue.

Freeman left him behind. Elder academia's arena was the mind, the papers, the data. Clearly the cutthroat world of grants and review had not prepared this man to witness genuine violence. I will live today, and you will die, he thought, and felt the thrill of exhilaration and a strain of disgust at the scientist's weakness. Had he ever been a cowering lump of flesh, prey for the vicious beasts now prowling the corridors? Or did his decision to live, and willingness to kill, set him apart? Movement in front of him demanded answer and he raised the gun, but hesitated.