Physics of the Crowbar

Finest of Men

"I can't hold on!" a man cried above him. And then he fell, white coat streaming around his flailing body.

Freeman watched him vanish down the shaft, all twenty-seven stories of unlit gravity. He clung to his yellow ladder and shuddered in sympathetic horror. He knew how long the fall would take. Calculating terminal velocity for the average human weight was a child's exercise.

But today was not a day to think about numbers. Numbers became odds, and body counts, and exponential growth of dimensional rifts.

He uncurled one orange-gloved hand from the yellow rung and forced it up. One boot up after it. Next rung. He climbed by force of will, his guns and crowbar clanking off the painted steel. Then he edged around the narrow banded safety strip and climbed again. Four stories up, he saw the ladder hanging over empty space. He had no room to back up and run this time. And only one way forward.

Breath in. Breath out. Brace. Leap.

He caught the lowest rung and clung, its surface sticky with blood and sweat from the fallen man. His own body was dead weight over the black pit and his shoulders groaned with the effort of hauling himself up. One rung. Then the next. He curled his body up awkwardly, getting a toe in the lowest rung to provide leverage.

He rolled onto the elevator's roof and sat panting against the cable box. His shoulders shook with strain and adrenaline. And fear.

Freeman was as afraid of dying as any human, and disinclined to die by alien parasitism, but the shuffling puppets, acid-spitters and bipeds didn't make his heart pound and vision narrow the way the black space below him did. Maybe it was the biology thing again, maybe he'd fear the visceral death more if he understood it as well as he understood the simple act of falling.

Because it wasn't the splatter at the bottom that gave him nightmares, it was the stomach-chilling wait between the last moment of salvation and the first moment of eternity, when the mind realized death was inevitable but the body hadn't yet met earth.

For a split second he was the falling scientist, grasping at open air.

No. Today was not a day for empathy. On the surface, under open sun, then he'd have time to process and remember. Now he needed to move.

The elevator gave him access to the secondary nuclear storage facility, behind the upper laboratories. He smelled fresh air, surface air, coming through the triple-layered HVAC filtration system. It smelled amazing.

A scientist pounded on heavy safety glass, crying for the security officer to open the blast doors and let him out. But the security officer wasn't obeying. He was standing upright because the puppet had one long-clawed hand around his throat and the other around his spine. With a sharp yank the puppet separated flesh from bone and the officer collapsed with a heavy, wet sound. The puppet bent down to feed.

The scientist backed up, turned and ran, and exploded. Bits of human rained back down the corridor.

Freeman froze, back to the wall. What new horror was this?

Oh. He saw the black box, the pale blue light of the trigger laser, and understood. The military had arrived, and they hadn't liked what they'd found.

He crept around the corner and into a maze of tripod-mounted drone guns, crates of extra laboratory supplies, and rippling yellow holes in reality. The guns came alive at his movement but were distracted by the parasites falling from thin air.

Thankfully they were easy to disable once upset, and just a fraction of a second slow to change targets. So the military didn't want to take chances with anything living escaping the base. Did they know they still had scientists and safety personnel trapped on the lower levels? Did they care? They'd seeded the corridors with claymores and traps, easily visible and avoidable to a human eye. So maybe they did, and were hoping the average IQ of Black Mesa would be high enough to avoid the traps.