NOW ARRIVING: CITY 17
Phosphenes flare across his eyelids. Hisssss of decompression. And then a sudden chill.
Chill...at least it is a sensation. He has felt nothing for...how long now? Has he been sleeping? Even in sleep one imagines sensations: sights, sounds, tastes. But for Gordon Freeman, for so long, there has been nothing. Not even sleep. Something deeper. Darker. Something so numbing that this brush of icelike vapor feels like the warmth of dawn.
Brighter now. Something moving out there. Someone. More sensations joining in the mix. Pain flooding back into his limbs. He would rub his hands, rub the feeling back into them, but he cannot be sure of their location. It's not completely reassuring to know he has a body into which this pain can creep. Less reassuring is the voice that crawls inside him, stealthy as the hiss of icy steam:
"Rise and shine, Gordon Freeman. I do believe I've kept you waiting long enough."
That voice...and somewhere, a blurred shape emerging from the darkness. A withered face, narrow eyes, a visage that seems simultaneously paralyzed and possessed by erratic tics that hint at extreme senility or neural damage. It floats in the vapor, blurred at the edges, seeming insubstantial. He has heard the voice somewhere before...somewhen....
"Ten years, Mr. Freeman. It won't seem that way to you, of course. But 10 years is a long time. Long enough for humanity to swallow its pride and begin to accept its common fate. Long enough for your fellow man to develop callouses against the master's collar. Long enough for the first scars of whiplash to begin to heal. Long enough to forget how things used to be."
There was a ticking sound now, a low drumming clatter. The voice was beginning to fade, the face receding. Sensation solidified into substance.
"But you won't have forgotten, Mr. Freeman. You still remember how the air used to taste. You remember how freedom felt. You remember...the sky."
And it was gone. A hard surface beneath him. The clattering sound sprang loud in his ears and he knew it as the sound of a train jammering over tracks.
"Hey, buddy...."
He opened his eyes. A face—not the strangely familiar one seen through mist, but a stranger bending over him. He sat bolt upright, startling the other man, his fellow passenger. Swinging around in his seat, casting wildly around him. It was a train car, and for a moment it overlapped in his memory with another train, in another time. Had any time passed? How had he come here?
"Mister, you can't ride around like that," the man was saying, watching him with concern. His voice was an urgent whisper. "Where's your mask? Take one step outside without it, you'll be coughing up bloody foam. It can kill you that fast. Here, look, I've got a spare. Can't be too careful. I had one fail on me once, and I've carried an extra ever since. Took some real damage that time. I hope I don't get in trouble for this, but you need it more than I do. Come on...train'll be coming into City 17 any minute now. Get this on."
He found he could hardly raise his hands. Life was slow in returning to them. As he tried to get his bearings, the stranger slipped a mask over his face, let the straps fall tight behind his head. A taste of stale carbon, and a moment that felt like suffocation. Then he began to calm down...reminded himself to think, study, plan his moves. Gordon peered out through the slightly rounded goggles at the dilapidated car.
Torn seat cushions; dingy light fixtures, half of them burned out; the floor strewn with cinders and sawdust and crushed cigarette butts; brushed aluminum panels showing marks of peeled-off advertisements. Here and there were posters of a solemn face, owl-eyed, watching over the passengers. Always the same expression. Always some variant of the same brief message: THE CONSUL SAYS...RELAX. THE CONSUL SAYS...REPORT.
"There you go."
The stranger fell back in the opposite seat, across the car, looking relieved and smiling slightly. Beyond him, the windows opened onto a blasted landscape. Wrack and ruin, desolation, shattered shards of a half-known landscape that only partly resembled anything he had seen before. It was as if the world he had known, the former world, had been lifted up entire and dropped from a great height. Crushed buildings; teetering spikes with frayed wires dangling from them. Fat, bloated trees that seemed to snatch and sniff at the train, as if sculling dusty plankton from the slipstream.
"Name's Samuel, by the way. Samuel G- 11789RF, if you want to be formal. Came through here, saw you laid out like that on the bench, I thought you'd already bought it. Don't know how they'd let you on the Express without a mask anyway. You must've been working in a dome, right? Out in the Waste? We were wondering why they 'd stop the Express out in the middle of nowhere like that— never seen that before. Are you from City 17 originally? I got my Notice a couple days ago: Shift to 17. Same old game. Shuffle the population, keep 'em confused. Spent my last trimester in 49. I've never been in the same zone more than six months. 17's supposed to be nice enough. I hear the Consul 's been stationed there for the time being. Might even get a look at him in person. Some people still hate him. but I say...how can you hold it against him? It was strike a deal or lose everything, right? We owe him big-time, the way I see it. I'd sure like to see him in person. Hey...there it is. 17."
Gordon shifted, looking out the window behind him. Something immense sprawled on the horizon, a shadow glimpsed through shifting gases like smoke perpetually rising from the ruins, as if they harbored a fire that could never be extinguished.
A city.
Layered towers paled into distance, located somewhere beyond the tangled sprawl of debris that made a menace of the landscape. Tiers of buildings of uncertain age and architecture rose in ranks, starlike—a self-contained metropolis, sketched in acid mist. Beyond those, harder to see, an immense irregular spire with its tip lost in the fumes that hid the heavens.
Samuel said, "I've gotta say...it looks a lot like 49. And 40 before that. They all look pretty much alike from this distance. Only when you get into them can you start to get an idea of how the place looked before...you know. Just before."
Gordon didn't see the tunnel coming. For a moment he thought the smoke had thickened so suddenly it had put out all light; but the sound of the train closed in around them, trapping them in a tube of darkness. Not long after that, a few dim lights flickered past, casting their wan glow on a gray amalgam of broken rock and cinderblock crammed together with bits of scrap metal. He thought he saw a human femur jutting from the wall; a rounded socket that could have been part of a skull. They passed through a portal of sharpened steel, razor-edged doors retracting for the train, and the walls become smooth, dark, regular. And then the wheels were screaming. The train seemed to sway on the track as it started to brake. Lights flared ahead, space opened around them, and they floated into the station.
"Now arriving," said the train. "City 17."