Barney probably drinks too much of it.

Black Mesa Area 3 Sector G Recreation Lounge has never run out of coffee. It will occasionally fail on cream or nondairy powder, sugar packets, and the scary artificial maybe-cancer that replaces them—it hardly ever stocks cinnamon or nutmeg—but there is always coffee to spare. In the spray-cleaner sterility of a research facility built to accomplish The Bizarre, there's this one vestige of everyday life everyone makes room for. And he's beginning to think it's the only color they'll allow in here, apart from the wall paint stripes meant to guide lost visitors and the crisply-pressed blue of his uniform. There are white ceramic mugs, white Styrofoam cups, white paper filters, white-handled pots that sit in white machines. There are white floors and white checkpoint rooms and white lab equipment. There is the white glow of overheads caught in steel, white shower stalls and the sort of off-white banana oatmeal Barney ate for breakfast. And God damn, are there ever white coats.

But at least they understood the importance of hot drinks during long, lonely shifts.

In his usual routine—start shift, half-shift and close shift—Barney bit open a pack, brushed away the spill, and dumped everything together. He poured in water and wiped clumsily at his eye crust, red ringing the grey-green (sleepy now, sleepier later). And then he set pitcher in brewer and punched ON. The chemistry of caffeinated beverages—that was the height of his science.

Barney perched on a counter edge, helm placed beside him, and waited for the bubbling to slow.

God, was he tired. Then again, he was always tired; early mornings and pacing nights were part of the job description, and worse, HQ recently switched Calhoun to permanent Blue Shift. They stacked his days back-to-back by bad luck of the draw. The money was nice, but it wasn't everything. It didn't feel like a whole helluva lot, to be honest, when his temples were aching like a ten-car pileup between a migraine and a hangover. Nine-to-fiving it would've been mercy at this point. Six o'clock in the morning right now, fifteen minutes until the start of weekday hours, but it easily felt like six PM.

That might have been in equal parts because Lauren played hooky from Area 8 Diner last night—afternoon, actually—to stay with him, or because Barney drank too much caffeine. He felt the effects. Knees clicked. Tear ducts stung. Both hands scrubbed his face, fingers scratching through close-cut hair, peppercorn black. (Military shear was not the way he preferred to wear it, but dress regulations are what they are). This bulletproof vest—like any of these eggheads were going to shoot him—hugged in awkward spots, rumpling buttons, chafing beneath the armpits, flattening Kevlar and mesh across his chest. Fourteen hours straight patrol today in Sector G. He'd feel his pulse throb against his boot heels by the end.

Barney waited with shut eyes and dangling toes. He pictured a woman's jacket hanging on the doorway and the dinner she was probably cooking right now. Lauren would've left by the time he hung up glock and radio to come home—chefs, too, know all about unkind schedules—and truth be told, after Blue Shift, they were both better off apart. But that said, the promise of three things pushed him on through these echoing, empty hallways: clean sleep shirt, Tupperware in the fridge, and a cool apartment ready for nothing else but slumber.

It was tiny, dark, unspectacular apartment. But the sheets were wonderfully cold and the mattress was soft enough. Low subterranean temperatures and tinted windows kept out New Mexican summer. The bed was a single, unfortunately, which meant Lauren made it uncomfortable through no fault of her own. But in her absence, there would be some kind of meat stew in the icebox and a few curly blonde hairs stuck to his pillowcase. It was a nice, though incomplete, thought.

When the brew finished steaming, he'd sit there and drink. It's not the best coffee, not the worst. It's all right. Barney just takes it black, anyway—first to save time (he tends to run late), then to wash away toothpaste or freeze-dried noodle aftertaste, and finally because he begins to like the way it sits in his mouth. There is a lean bitter tang like mulch and machinery; probably has something to do with all the fluoride in the water, but he can't stay awake otherwise.

This job—the business of watching, doggedly and endlessly (sometimes aimlessly)—will age you quickly. They had you skulking these halls, nose flooded with lemon cleaner and lime powder, at all hours; when you finally sat, it was to stare unblinking into the neon of security screens. Time blurred down here. No sunlight, no windows, no arid breeze to ward off the chill of the omnipresent air conditioning. Who knew what hazardous fumes seeped in from the ducts at midnight, or if radiation leaked up from spit-polished tile? (Any kids he'd have would probably end up three-armed.)

And this was all without mentioning the constant verbal abuse from arrogant, overtaxed science teams, and the paranoia of not knowing—but suspecting—exactly what went on beyond Level 5's Airlock Doors. Barney's eyes yawned into dark circles that hadn't been there when he'd first stepped fresh-faced and anxious aboard that transit platform two years ago. The murky grey had bled from them and turned his lids to smoke.

Barney drained his mug quickly, filled another, left the rest for some future bleary sap stumbling in here for Red Shift. Wouldn't be so bad. He only had to make it until hour-six break. Then maybe he'd get some food or something—freezing shower, turkey sandwich, another cup of coffee. That should keep him up until closing time. Long as he kept moving between start and finish, stayed upright and focused hard enough, there'd be no danger of falling asleep.

Just had to keep his eyes open.

Nightmare:

The first thing you recognize is a strange taste in the air. It is cool, odd, poisonously thin. You cannot put your finger on it. But it is there, certainly; the men beside you, Dr. Zajac and Dr. Anton, their clip-cards say, notice it as four angry eyes and twenty condescending comments unstitch to something much different. They stop bitching and hawing. They drop into silence as the stuck metal tinks overhead and you all take it in. That danger sense, that twang of wrongness, is alive in every inhalation. This is what you will remember when the dream collapses on itself. This is the fragment you decide to take away.

The taste—or was it a smell?—comes even before the very first tremors. Bulkheads all around rattle. It is chemical—something painful like road salt, then spearmint, then like sucking rusty nails between your back teeth. When you exhale, there is a weight in your lungs, a texture of suntan lotion. A frizzle tickles your hair up both arms. It crackles like cellophane and electricity gone wrong. Nothing moves for a heartbeat in time.

Then the white lights of this facility, an enormous place you barely know even though you've patrolled Area 3 for years, whine. It is not an idle sound, and when this couple of Weapons Lab ammo freaks (who have shortened your enduring temper all morning) say nothing, you can sense a shift.

Something in the belly of the labyrinth has grumbled.

That something is indefinable, but it makes you feel horribly vulnerable, every inch marked meat, a field rabbit two steps from hidden snares. The bulbs grow eyes. They look at you. They blink out.

You know it—suddenly, irrationally—but you do. You know it before the safety breaks fail, before any genius doctors do, before everything breathes out and falls. You can taste it in the oxygen all around you and it's not paranoia. It's real. Black Mesa is going to eat you.

Everything turns cold.

You should wake up now.

Barney was generally too tired for dreams. Maybe he didn't have much of an imagination leftover after staring through security consoles all day/night/day/night, hopped up on caffeine or salivating over keyboard buttons.

"You just don't remember them," Gordon informed him in the straightforward, brutally blunt tone that offended so many people around here. Barney was accustomed to it. "It doesn't have anything to do with imagination. It's REM sleep. Your recall would improve if you got more of it."

"Thanks, Dr. Nye," he'd remark, or something else cheekily similar, and go make another pot of coffee.

An upside of chronic fatigue was that, while Barney didn't remember his dreams, he didn't remember the nightmares, either. Once in a while, he'd jolt sweating up from a sound sleep with no idea why. Sometimes he could almost coax out brief images of falling, of his body breaking on the illusion of ground. But these fevers evaporated quickly, disintegrating from existence, never enough to genuinely frighten or disturb him. Bad dreams were a very limited thing in his experience. All you had to do was wake up—open your eyes, idiot—and time would reverse, horrors unwinding, ghastly impossibilities disappearing until the world was exactly the way you knew it to be.

Except Barney's eyes were open on May 16th, 2003. And nothing was like it should have been.

Nightmare:

There is something like a snap-freeze when the initial quake trembles Black Mesa Research Facility. Everything gets bitter and breathing stings. Might be radiation or the resonance itself, echoing through snake tunnels, multiplying disaster. You will have to leave that question to smarter men. You know only that the iciness sucks through your sternum, painful menthol, death wrapping fingers around your heart. Something groans deep below, air stopping in the shaft. Dr. Anton grabs the tin elevator wall.

"That sounded like it came from Anomalous—"

Boom.

Impact two. A second thump and everything changes. It's not cold anymore, not humming with filtered air and fans, but hot—unbearably, bone-soaking hot, a flush of sickness ricocheting from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet. You stagger. Your chest begins to tighten with the instincts of men about to die.

Boom.

The bangs don't stop. The space between them dwindles as this tight corridor begins to smoke. There is no way to deal with that onrush of sound and madness. It gets louder and louder and louder until your fine hairs all stand up, your stomach lunges into your throat, your center of gravity leaps for the ceil—

You fall.

Barney never remembered his dreams. But it was easier to remember how he felt when the dreams were bad ones, and easier still to shake them away when he was still awake.

"You drink too much," Gordon told him abruptly one morning as he slogged home from his post, lukewarm mug in hand.

They passed each other right here, right now, in Tram Corridor 3C12 almost every day, he and Freeman. Barney would be trudging back home with droopy lids and infant stubble as his higher-paid, better-educated pal clipped to work toting folders beneath one arm and breakfast in his other. Things ticked like clockwork in Black Mesa. They never ran more than a few seconds early or a couple more late. (Excepting Barney himself, anyway.)

"I'm strapped, smartass; I'm not drunk." He was well-aware of his eyes, bloodshot yellow, and his face, chin unevenly dark. These tram walkway lights were too bright and gasoline threatened dizziness. Barney patted his holster with one palm and gestured sluggishly with the cup. "Just beat. Relief didn't arrive last night so Lieutenant Pavelko made me pull a double, son-of-a-bitch. I'm about to hit the floor."

"I meant coffee. It's not good for you," Freeman noted with arched brow. He looked like an elementary school teacher all of a sudden. Math, probably—it was a funny image, Gordo with ballpoints stuck in his pocket, grading long division. Barney snorted and waved him off.

"Yeah. Pissin' Pavelko off ain't good for me, either."

Gordon Freeman immediately reminded Barney of a character off the Muppets reruns Grandma Rose made him (and his four older brothers) watch as kids. Red hair, weedy tall, bit nasal—always ended up button-push boy for his senior scientists in AnMat. Narrow face, textbook nerd glasses, made his nose swell where the cushions sat. Didn't make friends so easily. Kind of a doormat if you'd ask Calhoun, but nobody did, and it wasn't his prerogative to make physicists form spines. "Heyo, Beaker," he'd call out, too tired for much conversation, slug Gordon in the shoulder enough to hurt but not knock him down. His answer would be a micro-smile and speedy quarter-nod, Freeman's cheeriest "hello." It wasn't much. Yet the small daily exchange seemed like enough to sustain their friendship until off-hours lined up—which, admittedly, wasn't too often since Barney signed on Blue Shift.

"Take a weekend off," Freeman told him, sniffing. "You look like shit."

"To be honest, I could use the extra work. Blew my Christmas bonus riding the rollercoasters," Barney joked. The "amusement park" in Area 10 (neither of which existed) was a running gag between guards, who told tall tales to new scientists. He couldn't decide whether he should be snider about the rollercoaster thing or the joke-notion Black Mesa might dole out holiday raises. In truth, he'd spent most of his last paycheck on a root canal that left him slurring and tonguing for days. A facility dentist had given him gauze to bite down and ebb the blood. Didn't want to take off the rest of a perfectly good workday, so he'd stuck one in, cheek dry, and headed to duty looking like a fat-face chipmunk who lost a brawl. The guys on Red Shift had a field day with that one.

"Sleep debt," Freeman warned.

"Yeah, yeah."

"All right. You're going to faint."

And Barney had once, walking the Sector H wait station by himself some dim night on a double-shift not unlike this one. He'd had a massive headcold but no sick days free. Probably should have just begged someone else to cover, but Lauren had a birthday coming up, so he rolled himself out of bed and sunk his face in cold water until looking remotely human again. And in the middle of his worknight, he'd blacked right out, a ten second blink; woke up smelling bleach on the spotless floor. Barney cussed, brushed off and kept going—little embarrassed, little frazzled, and glad nobody but automatic cameras saw.

It was anyone's guess how Gordon managed to maintain status quo like he did, after so many months working in this unnerving centrifuge of a place. Dr. Freeman had been sticking on his ID card and lancing to Area 3 every weekday morning almost a year longer than Barney had. Never stepped off his train looking bright-eyed or bushytailed, really—not fresh-faced or eager—but always alert, fast-walking and ready for what needed to be done.

Where Four-Eyes got all that energy from was a mystery, but there he'd be, every 7:10 AM sharp: tie tied, coat (relatively) clean, prepared for the next radioactive spill his superiors sent him swimming through.

Gordo was an incurable goddamn morning person, and to tell you the truth, it kinda' got to annoying Barney right about now.

"What I'm going to do is go home and get some dinner. Breakfast," he corrected. Freeman eyed him skeptically with his own liquid breakfast in the other. He was always chugging back these weird seaweed concoctions that smelled like mowed lawns and maybe pineapple. "Energy drink," he'd answered when Barney once asked what the hell is that, blinking behind the reflection of his glasses. The cup contents looked more like mutant snail puke. No reason not to let him know.

"A real person's breakfast," Barney cut in before Gordon could interject, nose wrinkled, disgusted in the spirit of keeping that joke alive. "With actual food."

If he found the assessment funny, Freeman didn't smile. He hardly ever smiled, and even then, it was an awkward, mean-spirited twitch rather than a proper grin. Rarer still were the laughs. The man was serious by nature, and his humor came dressed up in pokerfaced tones. "This is actual food. It's NADH, two grains, shot of licorice, blackberries. It's more food than coffee. You really want to stay awake, you'd reconsider it, too. Caffeine is weak. And it will kill you."

"Maybe pancakes," he added, distractedly. Warm plate, little margarine, lot of maple syrup. He didn't bother cutting or slicing or any of that. He drowned them in it.

Gordon blinked, and thumbed the oversized glasses back to his forehead. "Pussy."

Just to screw with him—half out of spite, half out of friendliness—Barney stepped onto the rail tram, twisted around in that foggy Lambda logo safety window, stuck up his middle finger and took back the biggest quaff of coffee he could manage. It burned his mouth as the car pulled away.

And he was asleep long before pancakes, or before making it home.

"Wake up, kid," a voice tells you. Wake up.

Come back.

Nightmare:

You are still alive.

You are still alive. You have been running and creeping and walking through these halls for some time now, but you are awake, and you are still alive. You are starting to have difficulty keeping your hands from shaking, difficulty aiming the commission glock that never leaves the grip of your sweaty hand. Hands always look funny in dreams—hadn't Gordon told you that?—and whenever you glance down, there yours are, are pale and quaking, stained with vent grime and strange acid and the blood of broken-off thumbnails. You can hear every screw and sliding part in the sidearm and it sounds like so much more noise than it is.

Funny that even in a bad dream, you still feel the need to keep breathing.

"Stop it," you tell both hands (beg them). Your back teeth grind and your neck aches. Your sleeves are short and your armor is cracked. Your face is itchy and there's a numb spot beneath the bruise of a broken cheekbone, cracked by a broken lift. "Just stop it, will you?" But they don't.

Which could be very bad. You probably wouldn't have noticed how long this dream has lasted (time, too, goes nonsense in sleep)—except you pass a working lobby clock and see May 20. It was May sixteenth when you sprinted in late for Blue Shift. May sixteenth when two asshole scientists from the Weapons Department yelled you into a stalled elevator. May sixteenth when latches broke and sirens screamed and every auxiliary safety measure failed. You have been like this since then: alive, moving, always pushing, not certain the direction was forward. You just assumed it was still the same day.

"Come back," an echo howls behind you, but you don't, because it isn't real. You've heard it pealing raw behind every last corner, under every rubble pile, and you've run to check a dozen times. Because you have to. Because it's your job. But because changes very little in this maze; priority lists and safety designations have dissolved; personnel files are lost under miles of thick earth and disaster. There is no one and nothing to find or save.

Maybe you're imagining things. Maybe it's just the reverb of your voice, your cries for help—heard, unanswered, stuck beneath a collapsed elevator shaft and now stuck inside your head.

You keep walking. You have to.

"Spit that out of your mouth, Calhoun," Lt. Pavelko gruffed at the shooting range one evening, a long time ago, spooking you in your single stall, your world dulled by earmuffs. You tend to bite your bottom lip while taking aim—bad habit, unconscious tick—you over-focus, you see, on the pistol hammer at the far reach of arm. "Makes you look like a fucking princess. Do that with a Twelve and you're going to put teeth through it."

You remember this when—halfway down a hall with no plaster, white-knuckling a Spas 12—you realize that funny-tasting slickness in your mouth is not spit.

You found this new gun sitting—a better, heavier gun than lightweight six-shooters—just a moment ago. The weapon is clean and full and was lying only steps away from your former superior's corpse. It looked like the others: bloated belly, skeletal digits, head bulging inside a wet tan balloon. Stillness and drool rolling down shirt buttons suggested death, but you knew better by then. Pavelko, said the breast badge. Pavelko was not breathing; Pavelko was not Pavelko, anymore; but the monster replacing that frowning, wolverine face was very much alive.

Headcrabs (as you'd learn to call them later) remind you morbidly of pimples—fat, slippery tick bodies, claws like ice picks. Oh, they're killable, all right; their pores splurt green when fired into, their dead maws ooze pink pus; tough flesh bursts like grapeskin when you step on one. You've lost count of how many you've killed since crawling out of the wreckage near AnMat Processing. They are something from a nightmare. You have never been so scared of anything in your life.

Four leftover rounds in a nine millimeter wouldn't down the Not-Pavelko; your arms are shaking too badly for precision shots. Instead, you lunged forward and grab for that dropped weapon, praying its barrel is full of slugs. They clacked weightily inside. You twisted around just as the abomination lurched up, pointed nozzle at its charging body.

You froze, sucked in your breath, squeezed. BANG. A burst of gunpowder, a bee sting suddenly at your face. Buckshot splattered the foul gelatin crab off and into a wall. There were no brains left inside, just a mulchy stem punctured by alien appendages. Not-Pavelko collapsed and spit scarlet across scuffed linoleum. The smear of headcrab was not identifiable anymore.

You stood back up, pistol at a hip, Twelve filling both gloves. It fit all right in fresh fingers, did not complain about the ownership change. But you do not remember that your mouth hurts until you are halfway down another corridor and you look down to where drops of red plink between shiny black boot toes.

Your swollen lower lip wears three leaking toothmarks. There is blood on your tongue and a shotgun in your hands.

You hold it tightly, and pray to wake up.

"Wake the hell up, kid," Smarz snorted when he ran in that morning of May sixteenth, brow hiked, watching Barney's soles leave skid marks across Area 3 Entrance Lobby. He skittered around the front desk and almost forgot to check-in.

His overseer didn't look sympathetic behind thin glasses and under balding blond. Smarz's head creases deepened. "You're on thin ice with admin, bucko. Thin ice. So if you don't want your name coming up for a pay dock, you'll shake it off and show up on time tomorrow."

"I know; I'm sorry; I pulled a late tour yesterday, and my tram was—" Detained. He'd been preparing an excuse like this, ultimately flimsy but necessary at checkpoints. Barney left out the fact he'd actually been early until forty minutes ago—when, waiting on another pot of break room coffee, he nodded off at his table, ceramic mug a warm spot in one large hand. He jolted awake already fifteen minutes past check-in. Shit was all there'd been time to say.

"I don't really care," Smarz informed him, rumpled brow and calm, disapproving frown. The man always looked like that when he scolded you—like it was no big deal, no skin off his ass. He glanced at Barney's rough face, the hurried dress of a uniform thrown on, the uncombed tousle of black hair beneath helmet insulation. Needed to get it cut soon; didn't really have time. Needed to shave; forgot. Needed to get his weapons kitted and haul to patrol before anyone else noticed him missing… "If you can't make a shift, don't sign up for it. No one on this floor gives a damn if you volunteered to stay on overtime last night. And I, personally, have no interest in hearing about your transportation issues."

"Yes, sir. I'm really—" Sorry.

"Save it for Allison. She's the unlucky SOB we've got covering you." He twisted around to tap something into a computer. Intercoms beeped and keys hit out a reply. "Go report for small arms and then double-time it down to Sector G. Some coats from Weaponry are complaining the staff elevator's out. They've got heavy equipment with them. You either patch up that console or you're trucking it downstairs yourself, capish?"

'I'm not a maintenance guy,' he wanted to protest—nearly did, too—but the reminder of how easily badges are replaced dampened his sassier self. So, keys jingling on his belt and helm strap digging neck skin, Barney did what he always did. He followed somebody else's orders. He tried to fix things. He tried to clean up the mess, even the messes beyond his paygrade.

Luckily for kids trying to make a buck, there were always messes in places like Black Mesa, and always people who wanted things fixed.

May sixteenth—the day he'd been called to repair that elevator, almost an hour late for his shift—Gordon passed him just outside the guest computer lab in Sector G.

"Morning," he said, serious voice, striped tie, a skeptical arch to his brow. Classic Freeman. He was the first one to say it to Barney today. And Barney worked so much this week, he wasn't completely sure if that was Gordo's idea of a joke or if it really was a proper daylight morning.

He couldn't slow down. Barney jogged by in a blur of white tiles, sleepy eyes and padded armor. Should've been sprinting, but he was too tired; he couldn't make his legs move faster than they were; he felt each foot impact weaken the muscle from ankle to knee. Everything seemed heavier. There might have been a thunderstorm churning outside, turning desert air dim, soaking southwest humidity through miles of bedrock. With the trams out, Barney must've run a mile of rail by right about now.

"Can't talk; slept-in; long story!" His holster bounced at one hip and there was a chestpiece clasp he didn't quite get shut between both shoulder-blades. Should've asked Smarz if he had anyone closer to do this dumb job (like a maintenance guy), but it was probably some sort of punishment.

"I'm sure." Four-Eyes was on his way to the HEV tanks with papers under one arm and keychain dangling around the other.

Barney stopped only long enough to snap "Suck it, Freeman" and catch his breath. There was a considerable distance ahead. He hunkered forward with palm heels on his kneecaps and puffed for air. It was these vests' fault—hugged too tight—couldn't expand your damn lungs in them. Stupid helmet had jostled around and pushed a red line along his forehead.

"Are you getting fat?" Gordon asked without checking, distracted by his clipboard, gesturing to a nearby water machine. Barney smashed the button to fill a paper cup and downed it. Cold nothing washed the taste of stale coffee from cheeks, gums and tongue. "Thought they made you people do fitness tests every once in a blue moon."

"Fuck… you."

"Verbal aggression towards science staff. I could report you," Freeman observed, barely bothered to look. He had the ugliest pair of glasses known to man—Horn-rimmed, black, military-issue, lenses so thick you could hardly see the green of his eyes—but broke them too often for anything else. Last ones slipped right off his face and into a turbine. Dr. Kleiner was really pissed off about glass in his machines, too, so Gordon said—even told him to "rubber-band those things on or get the hell away from my equipment." Barney laughed about that one for awhile.

"I could put my boot this far up your ass. Where are you going? Area trams are out."

"Suit up. Running some tests."

"Yeah." With a last huff and wipe of his brow, Barney straightened upright. He drank another cupful of water. He stretched his back. He scratched beneath the ridge of helm sitting just where ears met scalp. "Listen; real quick before I got to go. Did your HQ say anything about drills today?"

Gordon thought about it for a millisecond. "No. Why?"

"Dunno. Just…" He cringed. "Got sort of a funny feeling. One of those days, I guess."

Freeman eyed him over his notes with a quiet sense of amusement. Barney never noticed when he'd reached over and clicked the top notch on his neck piece closed. He hadn't thought about checking it himself. Not until later—much later—the latest later—when shrapnel was bouncing off cement walls and plane engines sawed through the empty, open New Mexico air.

"Late nights are getting to you, sheriff."

"Yeah," Barney agreed, gulped one more mouthful of air, and that was all there was to say. Had to go now. Time to move. "I'm off. See you when I see you, man."

Dr. Freeman was already halfway down the hall and back to his data by the time he answered. The image of that white lab coat walking away towards Anomalous Materials was like remembering the last flick of sunlight of the very last day. "Goodbye, Barney."

Goodbye.

Barney Calhoun had someone looking after him all his life. He had never been as alone as he was that dark-skied May sixteenth, when a handful of brilliant men and blue rock destroyed the world.

When Barney was a kid—maybe nine or ten—living out in southwest Nebraska, he and his brothers had this game. They'd all cram onto Uncle Dan's battered grey ATV, age eating metal away 'round its oversized wheels, and hit the foothills spinning loops. Usually it'd be Robin or Joel driving while Cameron, Jake, and him clutched seat rails as tight as small hands clammy with sweat could. Safety was no issue back then, when a child's too alive to understand he can die. They flipped it over at least three dozen times. They were stupid boys—lucky boys, too, considering no one had broken his neck. Half that vehicle would lift off the ground every sharp turn, flatten sloppy figure-eights through crabgrass. Every stone bounced them high. Gasoline reeked through the faint texture of exhaust. The motor choked and growled. Dust and grasshoppers and plant stickers would be flying every which way, painful sometimes—dirt got in eyes, sweater sleeves, nostrils—but they kept going faster and kept clinging on. That was the whole objective, start to finish: try to hold on longer than everyone else.

Barney never won their game. There would always be a feint, a squealing twist, a hole he hadn't anticipated, and the bar would break his fingers away, and he'd fall.

Little later, when Barney was more like fourteen or fifteen, it'd be Joel's rusted-out red Ford pickup—all five of them good and drunk (especially Joel)—nothing but sundown and burnt wheat and heat-cracked old road, driving who the hell knows where. He'd be sitting shotgun with elbows hanging out, three brothers in the flatbed; eldest drove, youngest got the seatbelt. There were more cows and cornfields than cops or cars. God, they all looked exactly alike, few years apart between each one. Stupid boys; lucky boys; howling themselves hoarse on bad beer and country songs. The game was different now, making them allies instead of rivals, but its rules were still blissfully, idiotically simple: keep running, keep going farther, until they lost the asphalt or found their way home.

Nightmare:

The first AnMat scientist you find is face-down in a pool of saliva and gore. Dr. Ahdia Saeed, PhD. It looks like a fuel explosion killed her. She was lucky. You pull off her nametag and stick it in the backpack you've taken for another time, a time when families might want to know.

You step around the dead woman's blood pool and keep walking, keeps going, hold on.

Dumb boys. Not a one of them had any sense. Everybody said so. They knew that, and they were proud of it, even when their antics grew so outlandish that Mom raised her bowed auburn head to tell them exactly what she thought. Barney could remember the silent scowls she'd save for Robin—two years older than Cameron, who was fourteen months older than Jake, who was eleven months older than little Barnard (their list went on and on). Rob was always the smartest one, the one they called "chicken shit," the one who figured out how real death was when he'd carried home a stray terrier and Dad broke open its head with the same hammer he'd just used to nail shingles on their tool shed.

Rob got scared pretty frequently when they played these games, first on Uncle Dan's four-wheeler and then in their beaten-down truck, but Barney never worried. He couldn't remember if Joel was truly that ace behind a wheel or if he'd just been too young and too stupid to care. Didn't matter in the end, though, because they never got caught and they never crashed. He'd been so sure they wouldn't, couldn't, he would fidget under the belt leather cutting his neck and reach to unclick, to stretch farther, to lean out and feel breeze ripping through five fingers. But Joel, somehow managing to keep the front tires straight—melting grin and cheap booze and firstborn—never let him take it off. He'd just laugh, Dad a hundred times less bitter, and smack him, and screw up his shaggy mess of black hair.

"Stupid crazy," Robin used to say when the pedal stomped down and they'd swerve to miss deer gunning across backwoods roads.

Nightmare:

The second AnMat scientist you find has a bullet in his lung. Nine millimeter, commission glock, smashed right through breastbone. Its angle makes suicide improbable. You do not wonder about the possibilities: misfire, jumpy watchmen, maybe a few crazed blue shirts exacting penance for this hellhole the only way they could. It won't make a difference to dead men.

You check for a heartbeat, anyway, then leave him there, red handprint pressed into an unbreathing chest. Dr. Sasha Popov, PhD. His name clinks in the bottom of a burlap bag.

Once, a long time ago when he was in the third grade and nothing mattered, Barney stepped on a water snake. He fell down shrieking his big brother's name.

Joel didn't know shit about first-aid, but he picked Barney up right off the lakeshore—knee-high in mud, fishing poles forgotten—and he ran his ass to the highway, Rob and Jake and Cameron huffing to keep up through the aspen trees. A postal van pulled over for them and drove everyone to the county hospital. It turned out to be a dry bite from a half-dead copperhead. He could remember how hard Joel was breathing, how he screamed for that car to stop, how the pain and sunlight and hilly forest got lost in mirage waves that blurred like a dream. Some kids wanted to grow up and become their fathers, but Barney's father was a mean son-of-a-bitch who had little for them outside belittling jokes and whatever blunt objects were in reach, so he always wanted to be Joel.

Nightmare:

The third AnMat scientist you find stands up, moaning, and tries to rip your face off with sickle-branch claws. You do not check for a nametag on this one. It's better not to know.

Joel wouldn't let him be too stupid. Just some, he required. Only enough to be a person.

"Sit'own, Chuckles," was all that needed saying whenever the Barney-that-was would move to take off that safety belt, tilt too far on the ATV, stand under wicked black funnel clouds and like feeling wild. "Use your head, you one-can drunk. You got too much living left to die like a moron. Come back and—"

Joel was a worthless alcoholic—he knew that now—didn't work, didn't try to get better, didn't do much of anything. Nobody talked about him or wrote to him or called to ask how he was doing. Nobody really wanted to know anymore. But God, Barney loved him so much, and the thought of never seeing that dumb, grinning face again horrified him like nothing else.

On May 16th, 2003, Barney made a decision. The trams were all out. The electricity overloaded and spiked erratically. The smells were noxious and rancid and diseased. Thirty-four hours into the City of Dis, he had hiked to that same Area 3 Entrance Lobby, screens blaring alarm codes, eyes wincing shut from the light and exhaustion. He had balanced the shotgun against a shoulder, typed with one hand, and he'd read.

There were sixty-eight professionals scheduled to work that day in Black Mesa's Anomalous Materials Department. Barney did not recognize eighty percent. All of them were Dr., Dr., Dr. Dr. Ahdia Saeed. Dr. Sasha Popov. Dr. Adam Boulanger. Dr. Bailey Michael. PhD.

Twenty-seventh down, unremarkable, white lettering against incandescent blue:

Dr. Gordon Freeman, PhD.
BLACK MESA ID 1158014
Security Clearance Level 3-d
Clock IN: 07:12
Clock OUT: -
Area Designation: Test Lab C33/a.

Ground Zero.

Barney Calhoun had neither a Dr. in front of his name nor a PhD after, but he'd known the man who pushed the cart. He had known Gordon Freeman, the man who flipped a switch and introduced the end of it all.

"You're nothing," Dad would slur when he'd get in one of his moods. Only had two, and one was asleep. Come from nothing and never goin' to be nothing.

Maybe some prophecies are self-fulfilling, because Barney hadn't become much. He never pushed too far, never bother finding out what his limits were. It was too hard; too much trouble. He was not an ambitious man. He couldn't fix this.

But he was going to find a better man—a man who could fix it; who could turn this madhouse backwards; who could get the world making sense again—and he was going to wake him up, and he was going to protect him, and Barney Calhoun was going to get him out of this nightmare.

Nightmare:

The last scientist you find will stand up in a rust-red cargo car and call out: "Is anyone there? Can you hear me? I'm human! Come back!"

"Barney? Barney. Barnard James Calhoun, you'd better be faking it."

Sunglow curls gnarled over his face and fingers in Barney's ribs when he'd startle, lids suddenly open, not seeing much. She always seemed two parts annoyed and one humored when he'd fall asleep mid-sex. They'd be on his shitty boxspring, rotation of fan blades lulling him unconscious; jeans on the floor and shirt half-on; dark circles hidden by a darker room. There would be a moment of confusion until he could remember, recalibrate. Most of the time it would happen in the thirty second window of unsnapping a bra or zipper; his leg would slump, his hand get inordinately heavy on her head. She would come out of the bathroom or stop kissing his stomach. She wouldn't be mad. She would be all arched look and deflating smirk; she'd say for real? For real, Barney? I know you're faking it.

And Barney would never be faking it, but sleep in his eyes and bleary grin, he'd always pretend that he had.

Lauren was the kind of girl you married. Not him, but somebody would. She was a little older than Barney, thirty-two to his twenty-three, and it made him suspicious at times, wondering if this was some sort of mommy game. But eighty percent of one-hundred, he didn't really care. They hardly ever fought. They drank the same kind of beer. She called him "kiddo" and accused him of needing a bib; he called her "my old lady" and asked if she needed help crossing the street.

Lauren really fucking hated Gordon, though. Most people tended to fucking hate Gordon.

"My God, the man cannot stand me," she'd whisper after they'd head home from that pub in Topside Area 6, Barney pleasantly Guinness-drunk, arm slung over her shoulder. Funny that he'd met his girl through Gordon, that Four-Eyes had known her first, and that she'd soured so quickly on the white coat she used to call shy, sheepish, cute and now calls cold, condescending, rude.

Dr. Freeman went into Area 8 Diner Thursday mornings, when the place was really dead, to finish paperwork and eat in a quiet corner booth. Ordered the same stupid blueberry muffin every time—paper napkin, tap water, nothing else. That was Beaker, all right. Poor Lauren mistook this for depression; she tried to chat him up every time he'd slink in there, his posture awkward and insectoid, her presence careful and sunny. Hilarious to think about now, of course: babe in a turquoise apron and pink lipstick, annoying Gordon with attempts to be friendly.

"She tried to get in my poor buddy's pants," Barney would happily explain when asked how they met, grab the pink flesh of her cheek between two fingers—get socked in the abdomen, shoved, whacked with whatever was in Lolly's hand. It was only funny because it was true.

Sometimes you had to wonder if that's why Freeman arranged for them to bump into one another—he genuinely thought she was his friend's match, or if he just wanted to get a pretty, too-talkative woman off his back. Gordo's loss. He'd spoken only a few courteous, precursory, circumscribed words to Lauren before inviting him to breakfast one day, intoning he'd met someone Barney would like.

Gordon was right, though. He did like Lauren. She was foul-mouthed in a friendly way, tank-tops and pajamas, soft arms and an hourglass silhouette, smelled like cloves. They went on a pathetic double-date once—he and Lolly, Gordon and Dr. Gina Cross—to some misty, mostly-forgotten bar set in old-fashioned bronze. It was their unofficial three-month anniversary. Barney had needled Freeman for weeks about inviting Area 3's Hazardous Environment Supervisor out, and this created a tangible excuse.

God knew why he had given Gordon such a hard time about Cross. Maybe because he hoped someone could loosen Freeman's threadbare personality up for a change, make him play normal male once and a while. (Cross had—and he swears this is true—referred to Four-Eyes as "that hot redhead from AnMat.") Or maybe it was simply because Barney was happy, and it irritated him somehow: that his first (here) and best (anywhere) friend arranged it, but would not or could not share in that happiness.

"Aw, Lolly. That's just Gordon. He likes you fine."

But because Barney had bitched and prodded, Freeman caved. Neither scientist looked particularly enthusiastic about their forced date; their chatter inevitably turned to research notes or test samples. It was no use. They'd ordered a few drinks, hovered around the booth a while, left it open. Then they'd sort of dissolved apart. Barney and Lauren retreated to the embarrassingly vacant dance floor, Blues over tinny loudspeakers, companions forgotten in dark beer and the way her back sunk into his front during slow songs. Freeman dissected a bowl of chips while Cross complained about Calhoun's practice team and training course errors. They spent their outing this way, half-dancing, swaying back and forth with his arms around Lauren's waist, chin on her shoulder, a lulling daze like sleep.

Operation Freeman-Cross failed. Not miserably—just petered out before the fumbling effort ever got a root in ground. Gina's inquiries got too politically correct after a while. And Barney felt a little guilty about forcing the issue, a little angry Four-Eyes blew a break charitably handed over, a little useless in that he could not repay the favor Gordon had done for him. People just sort of felt like Freeman looked at them like they were something growing in a Petri dish.

"I think he's maybe had three conversations with me. Three conversations in… how long I've been holding you up?" Some five months now. "And the deepest confession I've ever gotten from him—the craziest he's gone in my presence!—was 'I don't really like seafood; can we go someplace else?' He thinks I'm a total idiot," Lauren'd complain, laughing a bit, honest resentment beneath the grin. "Maybe if I'd met him with a PhD on the wall and not some potholders. Must be all he thinks I do: puff pastries and suck you off."

"Come on. Gordon's not like that," he'd protest halfheartedly.

"How the hell do you even know what he's like? I can get more dialogue from a toaster."

Which was why most people tended to fucking hate Gordon. Barney tried to explain: Freeman wasn't a nut to be cracked, silent as a challenge, or to be off-putting. It's just how he was. You either got it or you didn't. In his experience, most people didn't get Gordon, and Gordon was probably fine with that.

He didn't seem to want many friends. Funny, because Barney always seemed to have plenty of them. "Friends," anyway—guys that gave him a hard time, old triggers-on-loan, pistol-jockeys—whose raunchy jokes he laughed uneasily at, never positive whether the mockery was good fun or if they sat around shit-talking him in the breakrooms afterwards. But they were people to drink, snicker and bitch about potbellied bosses with. Fair-weather jackasses were better than nothing, at least, for him.

Dr. Freeman had colleagues, heroes (Isaac Kleiner), scolds (Arne Magnusson), a mentor (Eli Vance—the single, solitary AnMat guy who'd ever said "please" or "thank you" to Barney when he'd bypass stuck doors for them). But when it came to friends, the nondescript, perpetually-drowsy blue-shirt from Area 3 felt pretty sure he was the only one Gordo had.

Barney knew what it was like. He'd been a weirdo back in school, too: rumpled clothes, unspectacular grades, vague pot smell on his old patchy bomber coat. Not a troublemaker; just not a star. Made the football team freshman year; got kicked off one semester later, not because he'd quit but because he'd stopped going to practice. Didn't like the way those guys talked to each other and never seemed able to make friends with them. Didn't like sitting in class, either, but had nowhere better to be. Too lazy to shave most of the time. Little unkempt. He was a lightweight clown so people would like him, but unnoticeable apart from that.

Two years of the cheapest state college to accept him were enough to make this whole academia thing seem useless. He'd picked up a job for campus security; managed an Associate's in Criminal Justice; worked freelance in parking lots, automobile shows, then full-time at Don-Savine Corporate. Barney wasn't sure how exactly how he ended up at Black Mesa. Someone's recommendation, stupid award and a random suggestion. They had a prodigious turnover rate; with these hours, it wasn't hard imagining why.

Once he dragged Freeman drinking with his other friends, the four guys from Red Shift who glugged cheap booze every third Friday after close. Looking back, it wasn't a gold-star idea.

"Who the fuck was that?" Stevens asked the next night, stuck in a monitor room, drinking coffee two shades lighter than Barney's. The latter just shrugged. He tried to blend in with the jocular-chic in his division; he tried not to make wakes. "Can you not bring your pencil-necked friends from upstairs? I don't think he spoke five words. Gave me the creeps. "

Yeah, well, was all Barney said.

The guys from Red Shift were a bunch of assholes. Probably why he liked hanging out with Gordon.

There aren't a lot of places to have fun in Black Mesa. Their cantinas are all identical, the dance clubs are comically outdated, the residential parks sparse with little sunlight. Area 6 Bio Dorm boasted a golf course, but neither of them had clearance. What they had locally was a pool and a shooting range. First one packed so much chlorine it burned your nose. Second one wasn't precisely legal to play around in sans breast badge, but Black Mesa didn't house many gun fights, so nobody wasted much time polishing their aim. It flooded about three weeks before the bi-yearly inspection. Apart from that, Barney'd swipe his pass card, grab two pistols off a shelf, then he and Gordo would walk right in to an empty lot. They'd shoot their way through more ammunition than it seemed possible to ever need.

"You know," he observed once, earmuffs around his neck, surveying the dark spots in a paper dummy. Chest, stomach, right ear gone. "You don't suck with that thing, Freeman."

Gordon adjusted his glasses with pistol firmly in hand. He held it no differently than a screwdriver or test tube. "Family in Michigan. My mother's. Rednecks."

Scoff. "Rednecks. You wouldn't know a redneck if he jumped up and bit you in the ass, Beaker."

"Are you threatening me?"

"Fuck you," Barney politely informed him, what he always did when caught comebackless. They fired off another few rounds. He watched Gordo figure out how to disassemble and reload the handgun—only took him a few seconds—assess, attempt, check and remake. "Ever killed anything?"

"Turkeys. You?"

Yeah. First, there was a mountain lion shot, mauled grass, an ewe crying through her torn-out throat. Jake had walked around the back of their house and hit it with a rifle meant for hunting bucks. That was the only memory he had of Dad being proud of them and saying so; he'd clapped "good eye," dragged the carcass away; Jake cried for having killed such an incredible thing. Barney remembered how quiet it had seemed afterward. There had been a hot pool of cat blood and whorls in red dust.

That stretch of grass looked no different than the campground fifteen miles behind Martinson College: woody knoll, picnic tables, someone's blanket, big steaming wet patch where he'd put bullets in a guy's liver. Bail-jumper, short record, domestic homicide. Officer Calhoun, Patrol Car #4 hadn't thought about any of that. He'd just heard something and saw metal and fired. It took all of two seconds. Nobody questioned. Nobody asked if it was reasonable to let security carry concealed off-campus (media said everybody had guns in that state). Nobody wanted explanations about vicious wildlife, wondered how he knew that flash of steel was a weapon and not a cheap watch, or sensed the crying woman with him was a hostage and not a wife. They stuck a medal on his blue shirt. Hospital called later to let him know the knifeman died of peripheral complications. Barney didn't know why they'd do that, or why anyone would want to know.

"Nah," he said.

That might've been the time Guthrie busted them—guard shooting outside his slot, Freeman somewhere scientists shouldn't be. Sergeant pulled Barney out of a cubicle by the back of his jacket and chewed him out. He took the chastisements silently and contritely; youngest sons are good at getting through trouble unscathed. Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.

Guthrie walked away with a threatened suspension and two docked shifts. There wasn't much to do but stand there until he was far enough to leave.

"Gobble," Gordon said, clicked an imaginary hammer with his right thumb, and mime-shot the sergeant right in the back of the head.

Barney thought Gordon Freeman was the most hilarious person he ever met. Wasn't much fun—terrible conversationalist, bad with people, drained the life out of a party. But he'd crack these smart-assed comments off without warning, his face completely deadpan, glasses blank with light glare, mouth so serious you wouldn't catch the joke if you didn't know Gordon. They'd floor Barney with tears in his eyes when nobody else got it. Hanging out with Dr. Freeman was like one unending inside guffaw.

"He just doesn't seem to give a fuck. I don't see how you deal with it," Lauren went on, hand chopping the air. Barney liked the plum color she painted her nails less than he liked that she nibbled on them. The thumb got it particularly bad. He could've guided her arm away, stopped an absent habit, but she looked too cute. There she'd be, sitting side-sofa, scribbling into management sheets, biting away beneath the blare of an unwatched TV. He fell asleep to that sight a lot. And he'd wake up a lot to one of those purple fingernails, bare legs across his lap, pointer hovering close as it could get without poking him in the nose. And she'd be teasing, childishly: "Barney. Baaarney… wake up, Barney, I know you're faking it…"

He was never faking it. But for her sake and for his, Barney always pretended he had.

"Lolly kind of thinks you hate her," he informed Gordon one morning as they caught a bumpy tram ride to the temporary transit station in Area H.

You could barely move in those damn trains. They were usually deserted by the time Barney would catch his outward-bound after Blue Shift, but riding in was a pain-in-the-ass. For more reasons than one: part because there was no fucking room to breathe with so many elbows and backpacks, part because that meant nowhere to sit, part because he spilled frigging coffee all down the front of his shirt and people were still glaring about wet seats. It turned the blues of cheap upholstery and his breast pocket pale brown. At least the Kevlar would cover everything up. Barney stood holding tightly to the overhead beam while Gordon, squashed in an aisle seat, shot his stain a "serves you right" look.

"I don't," Freeman informed him back, equally neutral. The scientist's gaunt arms were crossed in an uncomfortable slouch—too many people, too much air conditioning. Mild surprise made his reassurance sound almost pleasant.

"I know you don't. I said Lolly thinks." Barney had to grab on with both hands to steady himself. They were always intermittently working on rail systems E-J; their overcrowded shuttle jostled badly enough to rattle him fully alert before clocking-in. Maintenance weeks sucked. Everyone ran late. Lights winked on every rocky patch and did a very poor job holding the subterranean gloom of Black Mesa at bay.

"That's baseless. I have no reason to hate her."

Barney winced and tried not to feel pissed in earnest. "Great, Gordo. Real great. Who wouldn't jump for freakin' joy to hear that?—drop the whole thing. Can you try to be a little less clinical?"

"Good figure."

"You're a sexist, Freeman."

He paused, thought very seriously about it, and Barney appreciated the effort. Finally, Gordon frowned slightly beneath the sharp short line of red hair. He cleaned his glasses with an edge of coat sleeve. "She's a nice girl."

Dr. Freeman may not have been warm—not even lukewarm—but the man did no placating. You could always believe what he said.

"Yeah. Will you maybe mention that next time? She thinks we're not serious or smart or good enough for you or something. Says she doesn't know why you'd even want to be around us."

Barney joked about this once—asked their tagalong PhD if Lunchtime with Idiots made him feel more intelligent. Gordon didn't laugh—didn't even crack a smile—just noted, "There are different kinds of intelligence." They left it at that. Barney didn't mention the educational difference again.

"Funny thing is," he added, after chewing on it for awhile. "I never know what to tell her."

"About what?"

"About why you do."

Freeman scowled about it only long enough to polish his glasses in a handful of coat.

"Don't have a reason not to," he confessed, and as they shouldered through to Area 3, Barney couldn't see the eye-roll or the smile.

Maybe Gordon Freeman pushed that specimen cart because he had a dozen, a hundred, a thousand reasons to vest all his faith in whatever his supervisors told him. Maybe he did it because he believed in the experiment's aims. Maybe because he truly, desperately wanted to know.

Or maybe he just didn't have a reason not to.

Barney never found Lauren. He never found Lauren just like he never found Gordon, and it ashamed him to admit he'd only been half-looking. They were too far away—physically, mentally—the distance between this world and the one that used to be was too great. Barney Calhoun could not make it. He could not make it to Topside Dormitories; he could not make it to ground zero; he could not make their faces or their safety echo of reality in all this chemical haze. All he could do was move. There was only to keep on, keep going; to wake up, Barney; come back, Barney; don't fall asleep now, we barely—you can't—I'm not—have to stay awake.

He tried to stay awake with cold water and pinches. He tried to ignore the blurriness of that television set, the heaviness of each eyelid, to focus instead on heat in his belly and how the silk shift sat over her hips. But as he did too often, Barney fell asleep before they made love, and did not wake until hour Blue Shift.

Nightmare:

You don't notice your stomach growling until Day Three. You follow a trail into Area 3 Recreation Zone 6b—big orange letters: SCIENCE STAFF ONLY—thinking only of live physicists and soft couches, a moment's rest. You step in.

Then you smell microwave burn. Cheap ramen, brittle carrots, bad peas, and you realizes you've had nothing but water, water from fountains with push-buttons that gently warn Waste Not. You don't have enough discipline left to read vending machine labels. You don't have the energy to make choices with so many bullets and tags in your pack.

You are so hungry.

Half-aware of what you're doing, you reach into your pockets searching for quarters, and you actually finds one, some silver remainder of old life caught beneath pant lint. You can't align the coin with the slot. The way your fingers fumble, thick and dumb, triggers such a despair in you that tears begin to well behind your eyes.

Then you remember your gun and simply shoot a hole in that case. All the plastic scatters like a broken child's cup. Colorful packages crunch on still sterile tiles and glisten like medical dispenser batteries. Tortilla chips, mints, gummy bears, salted peanuts. You hate peanuts. You eat everything.

Then you sit—sugar stuck to your hands, chocolate melted over blood calluses—and wait for the lounge coffee pot to finish straining.

It's quiet at this picnic bench, its surface strangely clean, golden wood. There's a bottle of ketchup sitting close, a napkin dispenser. The trashcan is clogged with magazines, articles and some girlie spread looks stolen from the guards' break room five floors down. A newspaper of another reality waits, neatly rolled, and you open it up out of reflex—place your shotgun softly on the table, shells settling upon cheap ink. Your stomach hurts on fear and M&Ms. Maybe you should see about clawing your way to a kitchen level—finding canned soup, some bread, dried fruit, something that won't burn the moment it hits…

The coffee finishes with a steam whisper and red blink. You cannot not find any cups and doubt your hands could pour that well, anyway, so you drink from the pot, glad for the way hot glass feels against cracked lips. It is uncomfortably warm in your hands but they don't care. You're not sure if what goes on from mouth to chest to buried insides is swallowing or inhaling; you just soak up that odor and caffeine and wet earth flavor. It is like being a real person again. For a moment, it's like remembering who you were three days ago, in those unsullied hours before May Sixteenth.

But the taste of ozone and sickness and rot hang heavy just outside to bring you back. Back to the crack and zuzz of cut wire, to overloaded circuits, to dead almost-animals. You can smell buckshot leaking in a monster you've shot just around the corner. It sears through the floor. Its brains eke through limp tentacles—deadly mush—the fluorescent, alien glow that this existence, this place, now is.

"Have to face the facts, kid," Pavelko used to huff at you, his response to every complaint. You know that escapism has never helped anything. You can face facts.

You just wish you didn't always have to wake up so fast.

You tilt the coffee close as you can and inhale deep.

You're don't need the kitchens. You're going to fight up to the rail yard, you think. You're going to fight for a place where you can see sky and breathe.

He never got enough to eat.

That was a major downside of sleeping and working in the same place, Barney learned, and such was his sage advice for anyone from the outside world who inquired about Black Mesa's living conditions. It wasn't as though the residential dorms were ill-stocked; there simply never seemed like enough time. The temptation to sleep in, hit snooze, kick his alarm clock into a wall and procrastinate meant lots of skipped breakfasts and dinners overwritten to make up lost work hours. He scarffed boring cereal instead of bothering to make lunch. He nuked the fastest, easiest, least-satisfying foods. And, as a side-effect, annoying but tolerable: he walked around trying to shut up his stomach most of the time.

At least eighty percent of this trade-off was Barney's own damn fault; that had been obvious long before he had Gordo to point it out or Lolly to stuff his fridge with Tupperware casserole. He mostly ate cold salami sandwiches and shitty macaroni from a box. He rushed headlong into double-shifts forgetting to calculate how many hours stood between him and a meal.

He'd been pulling an unusual amount of double-shifts that month, though. It had just turned October, not quite Barney's second year working for Lambda Corp, and maybe it still felt like there was something to prove. The badland miles overhead darkened early, purpling the sand; the breeze picked up out there after dusk, dropping unbearable morning thermostats. None of that mattered where he spent the majority of his days and nights. Stupid scheduling had him patrolling noon-to-nine in his usual sector, then hoofing like a dumbass to man cameras in a completely different one thirty measly minutes after close. Took the damned trams fifteen of those minutes just to show up. Eating wasn't an option; showering, nope; and glimpsing the sun more than twice a week: forget it.

And all that was nonsense before the switch from Red to Blue. You know, he'd actually been sort of tan when he started working here.

"The hell are you doing, Beaker?" Barney asked one evening on his daily sprint for Area 3 Sector J, startled to find Gordon sitting on a station bench in the slow after-hours. He was holding a sloppy notebook folder with a flat container beside him. The greeting made Freeman jump. "Past your bedtime, ain't it?"

An uneasy, millisecond grin. "Safety meeting" was his answer, and he pulled the cardboard onto his lap to make room. Barney stepped over the seat and thumped down. "AnMat protocol. Admin makes us go through one or two every year. Talk about vision and objectivity. Remind us to keep our goggles on, no blocking the emergency wash. Review dangerous equipment. Et cetera."

"Sounds like a barrel of goddamn laughs," said the man with the gun. His helmet clunked left-to-right, chin strap hanging. He had a fistful of breakroom coffee, a rumbling stomach, fatigue wrinkles beneath both eyes. "Where you going?"

"Home. Sleep."

"Lucky you."

Freeman adjusted his glasses, fought with his dorky red tie. There were printer stains on it and on both of Gordon's hands, too. "Another shift?"

"Yeah. Been out here since noon. I'm fucking starving."

That was all it took. Then there was an open box—there was pepperoni, crumbly dough, and greasy mozzarella in his hand. Gordo set his carton of cheap, unappetizing dinner back down unenthusiastically, but right at that moment, stuck between shifts, junk food was the best possible thing that could've happened in Barney's life.

"Oh, man. Yes. You are my fucking hero," he gushed around a sloppy mouthful of pizza. It was gone in two bites and a shower of crust. Before he could swallow (if he even did), Gordon was handing him another piece, and politeness didn't dare show its face. "I owe you a beer, man."

"More than one."

If Barney was a more observant person, he might have noticed the odd way Freeman looked that evening; he might have caught that strange twinge of discomfort behind the typically apathetic face. You couldn't ask him what was wrong, what was bothering him. And there often wasn't much point, anyway; four out of five, it had to do with some unsolvable query, a partial theorem, a mechanism that wouldn't work. So maybe you could forgive a kid, then, for not seeing it—for not speaking sense—for saying nothing that stopped the Event.

"Barney, do you believe in God?"

"Wow, I dunno. I guess so. Sure." Salty tomato sauce made caring about divines hard. He'd been brought up in a good Lutheran household, for all that meant these days; Mom used to comb her boys' mops flat, button them up and drag them through a church aisle on holidays. Consecration and birch pews failed to resonate. Barney never spent much time worrying about things he could not see, touch, and change. "Do you?"

Gordon knew him well enough to tell it wouldn't offend. "No."

"Bad scientist if you did." He ate another cut.

"There are a lot of ways to be a bad scientist. That's the least of them." Darkness out-beyond the railway tunnels was distracting Freeman, making him gaze vacantly, as though he'd been looking for something without knowing what it was. "Do you think some things weren't meant to be understood?"

"Like this conversation?" he quipped. Instead of a comeback, another pizza wedge.

"I'm talking about human limitations. It's a question of responsibility, not ability. Are there some things Man was not meant to do? Things that are hallowed. Sacred. Meant for a god."

"Jesus," Barney chuffed, just wanting to eat.

Gordon caught the irony but didn't make any fun. His hands seemed inordinately heavy hanging on their wrists. He did not need a real answer, and when Barney couldn't deliver, let out more air than the gaunt coat looked able to hold.

"I understand the methods and their purposes. Really, I understand why the security protocols stand as they are. It's dangerous to let any one position compromise our facility. But these people—we get so infatuated with what we're on the brink of, and administration is so concerned with how we'll do it, that no one asks the other things. I think we're right, but I'm not sure. People always think they're right."

Dr. Freeman was a smart man—too smart a man to be comforted—and there was nothing to reassure him with, but Gordon kept talking, and he kept giving Barney pizza to eat. It was such a casual, friendly thing to do. Yet looking back with the wisdom of distance, it seems like there had to be more. Could there have been a response, a different comment, a smart-assed joke that changed the fate of a world? Could you even know if it had truly been an appeal for sense on that uncomfortable bench in a deserted tramway? Maybe he just needed someone to sit there, stuffed silent and stupid, to listen as a phenomenal board of white-coats learned more than their mathematics could contain.

Barney's answer?

"Hey, Gordo."

Gordo stared forward, elbows on his knees, hands a flat steeple point jutting towards train track. "Yeah."

"You think too much."

He was just a kid—just a stupid, inconsiderate, thoughtless kid. He ate all of Gordon's pizza without realizing it. He filled in the silence with jokes.

There was something of pity and admiration, something maybe a little envious, but something not unkind—something like an older brother—in the way Freeman looked back at him then. It was kind of an asshole expression, a twitch of brow behind glass.

"Think that was your tram," Gordon noted, and Barney—too distracted and too asleep—cussed, jumped up and sprinted after it, leaving his friendships behind.

Nobody yelled come back.

Barney didn't cry at all.

He did later, of course. Wouldn't have been human not to. They'd been states away and gunning a convoy of three shit SUVs, he and the couple scientists who escaped Black Mesa's blast radius. They alternated drivers, dodged sparse traffic, avoided any highways apt to lead into civilization. It was three days of that before Eli Vance—a baby girl with head full of curlycues in his arms—said they should stop.

"Camp somewhere," he suggested, voice weak. "Clean up, stretch out, try and sleep."

Barney didn't like the thought of getting caught, but everyone else agreed it sounded like a good idea. So Simmons pulled their hog-assed vehicle off-road, into the shadowy gulch of a red grit canyon. They must have been south of Cuauhtémoc by the time those wheels finally stopped.

While smarter guys were bickering about the wheres-and-hows of tent construction, Barney had climbed out of that stifling car and stood. There was merciless sun on the back of his neck. There were bloodstains and sand plastered into his clothes. His hands felt inordinately weighty and it was hot inside the squeeze of Kevlar he hadn't dared take off. Kleiner tossed him a plastic bottle and called to go fill it up, so Barney did, slogging towards the little pond they'd picked out as tonight's base. And when he'd stooped down—felt clear water flood open hands, his throat sore, his mouth dry—there had been a missing piece, a familiar glimpse of eyes in the shallow ripples, something realized cupped between bare palms. Everything hurt so bad. Barney sat down and started sobbing. Next thing he knew, Rosenberg was holding him by the shoulders, glasses blinding, telling him it's all right, son; it's OK; you're all right.

He didn't know why he was crying. Barney hadn't been thinking about anything or anyone in particular. It was just horrible. All of it was just god-awful-horrible, so he had to cry.

But he hadn't cried at all in Black Mesa—not when the elevator dropped, not when the bombs fell, not when the world began shutting on-off.

Nightmare:

You can't remember where you'd learned this. A magazine, a patrol manual, maybe a lecture from Gordon when you shuttled in together. But you have this information packed somewhere beneath bulletproof and coffee.

A human being can go three days without sleep before law will call you insane. This estimate varies between people—some tire faster than others—but as a rule, Day Three means delusions and misjudgments. Three days, and a human being will be unable to trust themselves anymore.

It is a good while past the eighty-hour-mark when you stop trusting yourself. You don't hallucinate. You don't think so, anyway—you're not sure how you would know for sure. There hasn't been enough energy to dream for a long time. But what makes you so certain your mind has been compromised is how, every once in a while, it starts to blink.

There is no dramatic fantasy or collapse. There is no apparent illness or injury. It is just a blip in time, that's all—a black flash, an empty second of memory where nothing exists, and you'll startle open with gun still clutched in your hands. They come more frequently as times crawls. You can't be positive how long these blank periods last; you are only aware of the moment-after, of the recoil, of the way your muscles lurch awake from the heartbeat pinch of micro-sleep.

You know you need help. You know you can't trust yourself when rest amongst monsters starts to seem more than necessary—it starts to seem sweet, attainable, like a good idea.

Your feet are so sore and everything feels incredibly profound. You won't let yourself sit down or relax. Each corner beckons, and your guts all swim haphazardly, and there is nowhere safe enough to risk what you know would befall you. Your mouth is like sandpaper; your skin cheesecloth; your lashes stick. The greatest doom is going to sleep.

And this is why you order yourself—left foot, right foot; one step, two steps; slack knees and wobbling hips—down a hallway in the opposite direction of light. There is a medical station this way. You remember this very clearly. Your stomach hurts on a mash of junk food and coffee that does nothing but fast-beat your overtaxed heart, but this you remembers, because security is your job, and first-aid is prerogative to a man with a gun. Everyone bitched about those emergency protocol meetings. How ridiculous the notion had seemed; how messy it'd be should some egghead croak over a damn nut allergy; how much they had scoffed, sitting on fold-out chairs with instant cappuccinos in hand, at the action-flick notion "if someone got shot."

The office is small and compact, something built for isolated disasters thought never to happen. Its sterile cot is leant against a wall, its sink full of splint wrapping, and the counters are wet. There are bandages splayed about in an eccentric Halloween prank. Someone has been here already, stuffing their backpacks with gauze, raiding antiseptic. They left the bulbs on and the refrigerator bare. A day ago, this would have sunken you like a barge, but today you cannot bring yourself to care. Your organs aren't bleeding. This is not what you stumbled here for.

The cupboards all hang wide, stores wrecked, locks broken. You rummage with sloppy hands until spilling a drawer full of last-minute tubes. It makes a big bang. A few of them roll under the cabinets. On hands-and-knees, head whirling, you almost slip on one—a near-catastrophe that would've passed you right out on this cool floor—but thank God, you catch yourself. You reach far back as your arm will go.

In one scoop, dozens of vials tumble out. You pick one at random. You squint to read it and can barely make the lightheaded glyphs into words. Your fingers leave a motion trail lagging through the dark-bright.

Wake up, Barney.

You sit up, take a deep breath, and jam the epinephrine pen through your pant leg, into your thigh.

When the adrenaline hits, you push yourself up, nearly faint, climbing handles until your feet are under you again. Everything feels cold and pale. You gasp as though your chest is full of snare drums. Frigid sweat seeps through your clothing and you can't tell if it's the nausea, the iciness, or the rush making you shake. But you are up. You are awake. You can walk and shoot and see.

You think you don't cry, but only because you can't feel the wetness rolling down your face.

The rest of the needles are flung into your bag with whatever clean splints and ointments still flutter on stainless steel.

Sounds don't sound right and your ligaments convulse. But you're alive. You're still here.

"You have to get up," Freeman said a million years ago, looming over Sector G reception desk, knocking the back of your helmet until you couldn't sleep anymore.

Neil Zajac and Javier Anton were a couple of grumpy old fucks.

Barney knew it the second he pried the defunct elevator open and they glared right past him, two Weaponry nerds, all princessed-up like facility malfunctions were his personal fault. "Doctor" in front of your name makes some people huffy as shit.

"—don't understand how we're expected to work like this. Do you know the computer labs on the main level are completely closed?" Dr. Anton, stocky and unfriendly, hoisted his eyebrow high at Dr. Zajac, wrinkled and blue-bearded. Barney pushed the machine tray in behind them. "If I can't access my files, I'd like to know: exactly which administrator is it expecting my team to generate data?"

"You don't need to tell me the electricians in this facility are incompetents. I was late to no less than four meetings this year thanks to tram failure. Tram failure! Explain to me why an organization with our funding can't keep its public transit running."

"Trams? We can't even reach our sector on foot."

"I doubt Aperture has to contend with broken elevators."

The lift shrieked to start under their rude chortling and a hammer of Barney's fist. There was a dramatic sigh of relief from Zajac and a triumphant finally! from Anton. They descended. This morning's coffee had gone sour on his tongue.

"Thank God for small victories," Anton muttered, his face mottled weird colors in the backlight of Area 3. "At the rate these things move, we'll be lucky if we get to the testing area by tomorrow morning. Luckier if we don't die from radiation poisoning en route."

"Lucky, indeed."

And they were sinking—slowly, slowly.

In twenty-two minutes, Barney wakes up screaming, pulls himself out blood and rubble at the bottom of an elevator shaft, and that is the end of things that make sense.

Radiation.

It's one of those far-off menaces. One of those flashy words that doesn't mean anything; one of those hazard signs only relevant in warzones and science fiction. Barney isn't like Gordon Freeman with hands folded around ethical questions; he has never been very good at fretting over what he can't avoid and cannot see.

He wears his regulation uniform. He bypasses yellow-flagged doors marked DANGER: NO ENTRY. Otherwise, Barney doesn't think much on the warning stamps scattered throughout Black Mesa. He doesn't research symptoms at night; he doesn't book clinic visits for every headache or flu. He does not worry about silent disease, mute poison, accumulating in his pores.

Maybe that's what this is. Sickness that quietly builds.

Nightmare:

You worry about everything and nothing now. God, you can feel the radiation, feel it stretch in your bones—yellow, green, orange replacing the whites and reds. Your limbs must be full of it. They keep walking. Run, at times; creep others; crawl hands-and-knees some. You do not think about it. You just shoot.

Killing meant something once. The person in you radiates out.

And when you've lost your last clip—stuck in a coolant basement with lanky demons and no leeway—you spins your hollow weapon about, and swing it as hard as you can. The cut lime of alien blood explodes across the leather of Vortigaunt skin, around the metal of a pump-action, across the cement floor. You can hear the plates of its skull crack beneath that broad singular eye. You see lips break, saliva drip, the flash of what looks like death panic swarming in sclera that remind you of Mars. They look like goblins. Doesn't matter if it's silly. These are monsters, all the same.

Fangs protrude when the creature hits concrete. You're not sure if the expression is meant to be a cringe or a threat. You're also not sure if you care.

There is so much darkness in the tunnels before you. At the end, they tear open to blinding, blue sky.

You show the goblin your teeth, and step on its head.

Calhoun, Barnard J.
EMPLOYER: Black Mesa Research Facility
POSITION: Security Officer
ASSIGNMENT: Area 3 BLUE SHIFT
CLEARANCE: Level 3
DISASTER RESPONSE PRIORITY: Preservation of Facility Equipment and Materials
SECONDARY PRIORITY: Welfare of Research Personnel

A dozen voices, none of them right: you are nothing, nothing; you better be faking; you need to get up—

LOW PRIORITY: Personal Safety

He threw his body over Zajac and then down, down, down the whole world came.

Nightmare:

You follow the rail ties through darkness until there is a small light, and you walk forward until that distant glow blue burns blindness and blood and claustrophobia away to fences, cargo tanks, barbed wire and finally: air.

There is a terrible fight. There is always a terrible fight, but it is with air in your lungs and day on your skin that the enemies change. You think this change should have bothered you far more than it does. But bullets mince human structures with less (or sometimes more) difficulty than the unshelled monsters do. There's just a moment, really—just a moment when ahead of you goes screeching a group of survivors, of men in white coats sprinting wildly across the opposite side of those rails. It's just a moment when the waiting soldiers—fatigues and automatics, robot-talk and prime objectives—open fire, and everything's madness again, but madness that makes sense, as rescue hopes splinter like buckshot.

You're lucky you hesitated. You're lucky you didn't flail out there crying help me.

You still don't fully understand why you didn't. But you're not allowed to be too-stupid. Just some. Just enough to be real.

You hide.

It's more than obvious what they were waiting for now. Most of the marines leave once the dust settles, and the scientists' bodies stop twitching, and their immediate area looks devoid of life. A few stay behind to clean. Dreadful that there is so little mess to demarcate the massacre; you always expected bits, gore, something horrific to mar crime scenes for future generations and monuments, but there's not much. Shells roll. Rapid-fire had punched some holes in train cars. They drag five physicists' corpses out and lay them in a neat pile; nobody bothers providing burials once the ID tags are checked. A man tosses tarp to cover them up. Then, work complete, three of the six-troop outfit climb aboard their ATVs and zip off toward another station somewhere nearer to Black Mesa's core.

You kill the rest. You aren't clear how. You narrowly miss a grenade burst that covers your face in packed sand.

You do not touch the bodies—of scientists or soldiers—and you do not stack your dead. You only take a moment to catch your breath and find your sanity. You almost throw up (but there's nothing on your stomach), then you stand and keep going. You need to keep moving away.

That's when you hear the cry: "Come back!"

It can't be explained, not really, and it doesn't seem rational. Because it has been so long, you see, so long since Calhoun, Barnard J. – BLUE SHIFT thought about people, that the concept of rescue cannot come easy. It's too large and second nature to feel strange. It can't permeate the shock of another almost-death.

When that voice hits air, though—the voice of something that doesn't want to kill you—an assault of senses return in an assembly line. The sun is here suddenly, warm and painfully bright, so bright you cannot tell if it hurts from burns or joy. The sky is open and stinks of gunsmoke and oil, not benzene and decay. The ground is ruby dirt—soft soil, not concrete, not blood.

"Wait," the voice says.

Your hands slouch around your shotgun. You've forgotten what being tired feels like. There's adrenaline thrashing everywhere inside you, making it so you can't analyze, can't see what's (who's) there. Everything is too fucking white—the white of safety bulbs and fresh paint and coats of better men than you were. You just grab a glimpse. Just a glimpse of light, a jagged spoke in the spent battlefield, a loose shard of a mind gone critical: clean glass.

It is like a ghost. It is impossible, a flare of something familiar, but you see it.

You died! you try to say—you can't be here, get away from me, it isn't right. But there is a catch in your throat and nothing comes out. That light just looks back, a little impatient, a little fond, a little mean in what it does not say to those who look-in from the outside. It blinks back as though you're silly for stopping, for bleeding like you are, standing there clinging to a barrel you know is jammed as Black Mesa burns down around you and you're soundlessly screaming no, I'm alive, fuck you haunt, I'm alive.

The light's caught in a pair of lenses, a peak of coldness, faceless reflection, black frames, kind of a jackass shine in the green the glass hid.

Gordon Freeman.

You cannot remember closing your eyes. You do not recall your consciousness unraveling, or the way your willpower finally dropped like two-thousand pounds from where it pushed both hands against the bottom of your brain.

You stop seeing anything.

You fall.

It is May Sixteenth.

It is May Sixteenth and his boots are squeaking on the tile. It's not his fault he's late—not this particular day—but that does not factor. The senior floor officer is pissed, scolds him in the lobby in front of a dozen researchers and it echoes into an empty locker room with American flags on navy walls. Rustle into armor, clack pistol to safety; he's in a hurry. No time for breakfast—just coffee. Blue Shift tonight. "Wake the hell up, kid."

"Wake up, Barney," says Gordo, knuckles rapping a dark plastic helmet, monitor glow tearing the color from his face. He jerks up with a dial print reddened into a cheek. Area 3 Sector C is empty as the trams change cycles, and no seven AM sun can permeate Black Mesa's brick to wake him, show the passage of time, warm the back of his neck. "Shift's over; you can go home. Come—"

"Come back," grunts the soldier into his radio, eagle-eyed, standing in the hollow of a deserted train yard with camouflage in stark contrast to piles of whites, reds, regulation blues. Fresh blood tidepools upon tightly-packed ground. It's from another AnMat scientist Barney found; the scientist's nametag says Robertson, and until a moment ago, he had been sobbing joyously for help and fleeing towards them. "I'm alive, I'm alive, oh thank God!" Robertson choked, grey hairs wafting wildly about his head, sleeves torn at each shoulder, face bloodshot to its very nerves. He'd scrambled from behind a crate so suddenly that Barney almost fired from where he'd been hidden across this sun-caked lot. "I knew someone would come; I knew they would rescue—" But that was as far as he got. They shot him in the stomach and let him fall, riddled bag of potatoes in a doctor's coat. The old lab head went squelchthump onto his face. Barney presses every thatch of his spine against a shady wall and begins to pant, eyes dilating, hugging rifle to ribcage, mouth dry. His body runs bitter, nausea cold. He had almost hollered out to them. He almost— "Victor Delta six-oh, this is scout 512. Momentary interference; say again. Come back. Victor Delta six-oh, come back."

No wait, no wait, no wait— Metal rubble, flattened chest and nosebleed, gasping too fast, severed arm still in its white coat at the dark bottom of an elevator shaft. There are gym shoes running away and the wailing sounds are strange—so strange a pitch—human ears cannot describe them. Dogs, porpoises, evilness with teeth and paws. There is so much weight bearing down and the ground is searing beneath his back, smelling of burnt rubber, a whorl of confusion where everything broke. He needs help. Barney cannot feel his feet, his hands, where Dr. Zajac's leg is smashed beneath his knee; the rest of Zajac is in several places, fleshy pieces. He can't move. His mouth tastes like copper and bile. Everyone is running. Help me, don't leave, help me someone please—

Come back.

Fingers on his shoulders, console glow, wink of light against shaven glass; his lids are too heavy, he can't open them—

"Barney, wake up. Wake up. You have to go."

"Wake up, son," says Dr. Rosenberg, and a cold palm is slapping his face in beneath a shadow of trains and body piles. The eyes behind the glasses are not green at all, they are brown, and this is not a nightmare. He is not dreaming. The world has startled awake. "Come back."

back to the land of the living

back and sit your ass down, kiddo

back and show me you care

back, please, oh God oh God don't leave me here

"Come back, Barney," Freeman called, and the smell of black coffee and the monitor glow and thump-thump on his helmet brought back the world.