Physics of the Crowbar

Void

The walkway ahead buckled and fell, taking a half-materialized maggot with it. The thing's sonic screams echoed eerily up from the darkness. No way forward by the usual path, but pipes went around. He climbed up into the pipe structure, praying they wouldn't collapse under his weight. They groaned and shook but held.

He knocked out a grate and slid into the ducts, oddly pleased to be using the crowbar for its intended purpose of levering things apart. The ducts were clean and clear of aliens and blood; the odd knot of dust and hair was a welcome change; he wondered if he could stay in them, if he could reach the surface via HVAC system alone.

Give the HVAC guys a raise, he jotted in the mental notebook. They were probably still alive, somewhere on the surface, blissfully unaware of the chaos below. Mundane tasks like maintenance and cleaning were taken care of by an off-site crew, on certain days, supervised of course but by personnel the base considered ironically unimportant and expendable. By Black Mesa's previous standard, that had meant meager pay, terrible hours and a rotating roster of temps, but by today's standards that meant not important enough to be dead yet.

The duct didn't go far enough.

He dropped out in an unfamiliar part of the coolant recycling system, where murky contaminated water moved sluggishly through enormous storm drains. Service platforms provided access, but rarely; and the cavernous place was crawling with life-forms.

They'd been here a while. No way the colonies of ceiling-clinging barnacles or the herds of parasites had spawned in the scant hour since this horror began; no, today was not the first breach in the walls of reality, nor the first to escape containment. It was just the biggest to date, the one impossible to ignore.

A door across the canal looked hopeful. Too far below to jump to solid ground, he opted for a hesitant leap into the water. His damaged suit let more cold moisture in and he didn't want to think about the possibility of infectious bacteria or radioactive particles. Who knew what labs upstream dumped their liquid waste into the system.

He slaughtered his way through the parasites on the service ledge and bludgeoned a maggot-dog to death to reach the door, and found it locked. Its heavy steel frame defeated the crowbar's attempts at opening. Apparently he was on the wrong side of the safety barrier, the OSHA-required impassable walls designed to keep non-maintenance personnel from blundering into the wrong corner.

Only one way forward. He eyed the sluggish murk. Ick. It was shallow enough to stand in for the most part, but an unexpected dropoff left him thrashing and gagging. He followed the channel until a service ladder let him out and found a health box helpfully bolted to the wall. Apparently OSHA standards were good for something after all.

He hesitated to plug in. The system would purge any infection, but what if it was spiked? He doubted it would be, locked away in this far back corner. It was an older model from the ones in the main lab, and had a thick coat of dust on top. His suit wasn't giving him health warnings yet, but the burn in his side was still tender and now soaked with contaminated fluids.

Better drugged than dead, he reasoned, and plugged in. The euphoria didn't come; clearly the opiate was an aftermarket addition. He sighed in relief and let the box do its work, imagining he could feel the antibiotics purge the still-healing flesh. The box chimed complete, still mostly full, and he unplugged from it. Hopefully he would find a hazmat suit repair station nearby too, and could patch the hole.

The catwalk led him to an unlocked door. The door led him into a maze of steel plate walls, an accidental space between necessary infrastructure co-opted to provide maintenance access. After many wrong turns in the maze, he found a catwalk over the cargo delivery system. Crates hung frozen, victims of some power shutoff somewhere else, over a cement-floored void.