SCRAPLAND
The grating squealed and swung down with a bang, sending sharpened clouds of corroded iron gritting into his eyes. The hatch would have taken a chunk from his shoulder had he not been wearing the padded suit; as it was, he nearly lost his grip on the rungs, and for a moment hung kicking his soles against the mossy interior of the access pipe. Then he was up and bellying out among sere thorns and broken asphalt.
Twisted rebar, a furl of cyclone fencing, a freeway guardrail that had been crumpled and tossed aside like the foil wrapper around a stick of chewing gum. Farther off, piles of the stuff, more than the eye could resolve, mountains of debris seemingly composed of every object he had ever known. Refrigerators, streetcars, a toppled ATM machine still embedded in concrete; stubborn flags of grubby, but undecayed, plastic; the scalp of a doll with its nylon hair seared back to molten blobs. Gordon struggled to his feet, dusting tiny bright shards of shattered glass from arms and knees, more thankful than ever for the HEV suit.
There was a whirring sound behind him, echoing up from the tube.
In a sudden panic, knowing what it meant, he turned and fell to his knees, digging down into the tube to grab at the dangling hatch. He hooked a finger in the uneven grating and hauled up, the suit's servos kicking in to augment his strength. But the HEV's new mechanics, never properly adjusted to its old wearer, overcompensated. The hatch came up so suddenly that it twisted in its hinge and broke completely free.
From below, in the dark, a flash of silver.
Gordon dropped the hatch as the Manhack came spinning up the tube.
Corroded iron hit the rising blade and bore it backward down the shaft, however briefly.
He could hear it grinding down there, working its way free. Another instant and it would be on him.
Gordon whirled and sank his gloves into a pile of pretzeled rebar clotted with cement chunks. He dragged the pile to the edge of the hole, grateful now for the augments, and watched it tumble in. The Manhack's whir dimmed perceptibly. This was followed with another heap of masonry, a cinderblock, the rim of a wheel with a few shreds of truck tire still clinging to it. The din further muted.
At last he uncovered a huge black can full of cold hardened tar, tipped it over, rolled it to the brink and kicked it down. A loud thud, the sound of settling grit, and then silence. The Manhack whined a few times, then went silent.
It was under there; he knew he had not so much disabled as inconvenienced it. But he felt sure its human operator would give up entirely before bothering to work the thing loose. It would be so much easier to switch to another station, or select another hunter from the menu.
Humans lacked the patience of machines.
Before stalking away, he found an ancient bathtub, one clenched lion claw still intact, and tipped it over before hauling it into place as a cap for the pit. Unlikely anyone would fall in there by accident now.
Still, there was no easiness in his stride as Gordon made his way through the wrack and ruin that had been piled against the margins of City 17 as if by giant bulldozers. He could hear the baying of something that wasn't quite a wolf, and then there were the far-off echoes of landslides from among the junkpiles. What could be moving around out here, huge enough to disturb the massive piles? The answer that came to him was worse than the worry: It could be anything. He had no idea what now stalked the lands beyond the city walls. Maybe the citizens had had good reason to withdraw into the protection of the Combine. Maybe the Combine had wanted it that way...
...
He became preternaturally attuned to the sounds around him. The only problem was that few of them were familiar, apart from the creak of metal in the occasional gouts of scouring wind. Inside his respirator, the air was growing stale; each time he adjusted it, an acid taste crept in, a poisonous tinge that seemed to coat his tongue. He wondered how long a filter could hold up. It was easy to imagine this atmosphere eating holes in the thing.
What was that...? A familiar sound, made eerie only by its incongruity in this place of ragged edges and decay. It was music...something old and half-obscured by static, but stately despite that. Bach, one of the Brandenburg Concertos, filigreed and ornate and utterly out of place in this landscape of active chaos and utter disarray.
Less mindful of his footing, urged on by the music, Gordon mounted a shifting slope of medical debris and found the Bach at its source. Below him, in a small depression among the scraps, a battered Dodge van lay with its nose hidden as if it had been rooting in the garbage, its tail thrust into the air at a jaunty angle, the rear doors flung wide. Light poured from the open doors, and with the light came the music.
There was no one in sight. It seemed impossible that every creature in the scraplands had not been drawn to the sound of the Brandenburgs, but Gordon was alone as he shuffled down the far side of the slope and crept to the tail of the van. Peering inside, he saw no seats, no dashboard, no windshield. The shell of the van, fused with what looked like heat-bored rock, extended at an angle for 40 or 50 feet into the Earth, and at the bottom of the slope he saw a tarnished brass standing lamp with a red shade, emitting warm light. It looked like the border of someone's living room. The music came from somewhere beyond the lamp.
Testing the edge of the van for stability, he eased himself past the fender and settled down carefully, so as to make no sound. Then he started to slide, letting himself down inches at a time. The metal floor creaked once, softly, and then he was into the rock tunnel. As he shifted his weight forward, preparing to creep, the doors of the van slammed shut with a thud, trapping him. The crash echoed down the tube, merged with the sound of Bach, and abruptly the music cut off. Just short of the lamp, a second barrier clamped down, sealing the far end of the tunnel.
How easily he'd been caught.
As the music died and the clanging faded, he became aware of a muted groan, the hopeless whirring of an engine on the verge of flooding. Then a roaring rumble, heavy clanking. Something huge came lumbering past the end of the tunnel and stood there, blocking off the light. He could see a milky white dome mounted in a dust-clogged grille, like a glass eye crazed with cracks and dirt; it spun lazily to follow him as he tried backing up the tunnel. Then it put out a hand, a claw made of scarred metal, with frayed black tendons and wire ligaments. As servos whined, the inner barrier lifted. The thing stooped in to reach for him, and Gordon frantically scrambled back.
"Hold still," said a resonant voice. "If you mean no harm, you have nothing to fear from us."
He looked for the source of the voice, saw nothing.
"Settle down, Dog," the voice said.
The machine lowered itself to the earthen floor of the tunnel and its straining engines muted back to a low hum. Its reaching hand retracted. It looked like a huge battered beetle squatting there with its legs pulled in; hard to tell what processes might still be at work behind the huge blurred eye.
"Come out, now," said the voice. "Come carefully and there will be no trouble. If you intend us harm, then I should warn you that Dog will respond instantly to disarm you. And he is not capable of gentleness." Gordon crept out, past the raised barrier and the quiescent mech. The corridor wound away to other rooms, to deeper levels. He could hear running water, generators, more music somewhere in the distance.
A man stepped out from the mech's shadow. Once dramatically tall, he now possessed a dramatic stoop. Grayish hair that might once have been blond; a badly cut beard that grew up over scarred cheeks. His deep, commanding voice seemed at odds with his somewhat wasted frame, which was wrapped in a tattered mechanic's coverall, slung with utility belts, the pouches crammed with tools and components salvaged from the wasteheaps outside. He walked with a stick made of matte black steel wrapped with wires, embedded with lights; several small buttons scored the grip of the walking stick. It looked like a weapon, but Gordon suspected it was nothing so simple as that. The man stared at him for several moments; Gordon felt himself being measured, judged. Then he thrust his head forward, one piercing blue eye skewering Gordon, holding him.
"You're the one they're looking for," he said. 'After all these years, I've caught something worthwhile in my trap." He nodded toward the ramp leading down to deeper chambers. "Follow me, then. Dog—come!"
As Gordon moved after the old man, he heard the mech rouse itself behind them. It stood as tall as it
could in the low passage, but he felt certain that its telescoping legs could push it up to a much greater height
"I'm Eli," the old man said as he walked. "The Junkman. You've met Dog. As for you...your name is everywhere now. They've identified you from some very old records. I'm surprised the Combine held onto such documents. I'm always interested to discover what they consider worth preserving. Most of what makes us human they consider disposable. And yet the records, the paperwork...they've devoted great labor to making that immortal. I suppose I should feel some comfort that my name and number will still survive in one of their files, long after I myself am gone."
Dog shambled after them, dragging bare sparking wires as if it were a streetcar sweeping the ground for a charged track. It was pitiful despite its immensity. It had obviously been a thing of great power once; but now it looked like something the Junkman had dragged off the scrapheaps and restored to its least capacity.
"There...the Consul's coming on again. They've been looping this broadcast all day. The escaped non-citizen, the violator...the Vector of Death himself, Gordon Freeman."
Gordon looked around to see where he'd been taken. A room hollowed from the Earth, really no more than a widening in the passage, but lined with worn-out couches and chairs, a low plastic coffee table covered with machine parts. Across from the couch, a splintered pallet stood propped against the wall; from that an old flatscreen television was hung on a bent nail; it looked like an antique, its screen scarred as if wild dogs had tussled over it. And on the screen was the face Gordon had seen everywhere in City 17. The Consul. The man no longer looked placid and reassuring; every feature, every gesture, had been given over to threat.
"We cannot confirm that the Vector has departed City 17. If he has, the Wasteland predators will make quick work of him. But rest assured that we have not relaxed the search in your city. The Combine will do everything in its power to ensure the safety of its citizens. Again, Gordon Freeman represents a vector of chaos and death, an incursion of the insanity and incivility of the world we have tried to diligently to put behind us. We are doing everything in our power to arrest and expunge this threat to the promised peace That the Combine has graciously extended to humankind. I exhort all citizens to do everything in their power to help us apprehend the Vector. Report all suspicious activities at once. If you spy Freeman, make no effort to interfere, but summon the nearest Agent, and activate all available alarms. Every such report is treated with utmost severity, and false alarms may be punishable by immediate execution."
The old man, the Junkman, Eli, looked over at Gordon and chuckled with undisguised glee.
"Well, well," he said. "You are most welcome!"