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- Jul 3, 2021
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- #1
Sergeant Marcus Hale
May 16, 2001...
A call comes directly from the Pentagon. Sergeant Marcus Hale, a Marine with the H.E.C.U. unit, is on standby at Santego Military Base in Arizona. The briefing was kept short as usual; it contained the details of a biohazard outbreak at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. No context, no real warnings. Their job was simple on paper: rescue survivors and restore order. With Hale heading to the armory, grabbing his equipment and rifle before boarding an Osprey with a dozen other men in his squadron dubbed 'Echo Squad'.
By the time their Ospreys cut across the desert and the sprawling complex came into view, Hale could already see smoke climbing into the air - thick, black, and twisting upwards into the skyline. At first glance, the facility appeared to be on fire, though nobody knew what was really happening. As their Osprey hovered over the facility and they attached their rappelling gear, the Marines proceeded according to plan, starting with a slow descent into the facility. Hale, his closest friend, Corporal Charlie Ramirez, and the rest of Echo Squad set down at one of the surface compounds. Within minutes, the operation unravels. They’d gone in expecting a chemical spill or maybe a weaponized virus. What they found made no sense. Their first contact occurred in the corridors of Sector C... creatures and various alien life forms ambushed them, appearing out of nowhere and ripping through marines before anyone could even fire back. Hale and Charlie pushed through the chaos, using grenades and endless magazines of ammunition to claw out a perimeter. Every corner revealed another nightmare - headcrabs, vortigaunts, zombies, bullsquids, and houndeyes. It felt less like combat and more like a descent into hell itself.
Radio chatter grew desperate. Orders blurred. “Contain the situation. Neutralize all witnesses.” At first, Hale didn't question it. Soldiers within H.E.C.U rarely did due to their training and expertise. But when he and Charlie had stumbled across a group of terrified scientists pleading for help... and their lives... something inside them shifted. Charlie lowered his rifle, and Hale didn’t stop him. They left the scientists alive. Perhaps it was a mistake, but who cares? They knew the odds of them making it out of the facility alive were comical at best. Hours seemingly bled together in a haze of gunfire, screams, and flickering lights. The deeper Echo Squad went into the facility, the worse things seemed to get. Strange green beams of plasma pulsed through the walls. Portals cracked open midair. They saw men vanish into violet light, even dragged through portals to an unknown fate.
Hiding amongst the maze of laboratories, they got new orders: capture a rogue scientist named Gordon Freeman. Command said he caused all of it. At this point, Hale didn’t care who was to blame anymore, and they hunted Freeman through corridors caked with blood. Each time they closed in, he slipped away again, like he knew the facility better than anyone else. Was it luck? How has he managed to evade capture for so long? Above all else, Hale saw what Freeman left behind... wrecked turrets, dead marines and friends, and a seemingly endless path of destruction. To him, Freeman was a murderer, a man who had slain a dozen or more of his fellow brothers on his path of destruction. Hale wanted Freeman dead, even to personally carry out his execution, forget capture... this was personal.
Hours later, priorities shifted. They forgot about Freeman and focused on surviving and evacuating the facility. By then, Echo Squad was down to five men remaining, and Hale had assumed command. The rest of his troops, including their former squad leader, had been torn apart by various xenian creatures or dragged away whole into portals of unknown origin. When they reached the lower maintenance levels - dark, damp, and reeking of death, destruction, and rot - everything fell apart. As they began making their way to a freight elevator, the ground suddenly split open beneath them. A massive Gargantua crawled from the crevice, firing flames from its pincers, reaching out and grabbing a marine, cutting him in half. Desperate, they made a run for the elevator, beginning to ascend before the cables snapped. Two more men plummeted below and vanished into the darkness. Hale and Charlie, who had managed to jump off, fought back to back, weapons overheating, and grenades rattling across the floor. The explosions echoed in the infested hallways, and flashes of orange and white light filled their room.
Then came the sound - a deep, low hum as another portal split open behind them. An untold number of headcrabs poured through, and zombified scientists shambled through the corridors, charging at them like a living tide. Charlie shoved Hale toward an emergency ladder. “Go! I’ll cover you!” he shouted, his M249 blasting headcrabs and zombies to pieces as the barrel glowed red hot. Hale froze. "I can't leave you, not like this!" He exclaimed. Time seemingly freezing, Charlie turned his head to be met with one final push. "Get the hell out of here - Now, Hale!" - one look in Charlie’s eyes said everything. He wouldn't be coming with him. Hale ran for the ladder and grabbed onto it, beginning his ascent... The ammunition in Charlie's machine gun ran dry soon afterwards. He grabbed a grenade and yanked the pin, its spool pinging off in a separate direction as headcrabs jumped and latched onto his body... Zombified scientists slashed away at his flesh... Charlie screamed as he was ripped to pieces... and then BOOOM! The blast turned the corridor white... then silent. Hale climbed until his arms burned, tears mixing with blood and grime. His squad and all of his friends were gone.
By the time he reached the surface, total anarchy had set in, and all order had collapsed. Air support was gone. Communications were crippled. Scattered H.E.C.U squads even shot at one another out of panic and exhaustion. The Xenian fauna were everywhere, filling the canyons, devouring everything in their path; it was a bloodbath. He tried to raise command again and caught only fragments.
“...authorized cleanup... strategic device... evacuate immediately...”
Hearing this, he realized rescue wasn't coming... Hale quickly jumped into an abandoned Humvee and tore across the desert as fast as he could. A zombified scientist shambling across the road walked in his path... BLAM! It pinged over his hood and the top of his vehicle, leaving a trail of blood. The gas pedal slammed against the floorboard. He looked in the rearview mirror, the facility shrank behind him, engulfed in black smoke with jets engaged in dogfights with Manta Rays.
....Then came the flash....
The nuclear blast ripped the sky apart. The shockwave hit seconds later, flipping the Humvee and sending Hale hurling through the sand. When he awoke, his ears were ringing, and a mushroom cloud towered where Black Mesa once stood. The air shimmered with heat and ash.
In an instant, everybody and everything were gone. Any memory of his friend Charlie, his troops, or the facility was erased. Gone. As if they had never even existed. Hale lay there staring at the sky until the glow faded; nothing but fear and trauma loomed over him. The mission was over. Black Mesa was gone. "Did anyone else survive?" He wondered. Even though the area had just sustained a nuclear strike, strange phenomena occurred along the crater’s edge, strange lights still flickered - unnatural, seemingly alive. Something had survived. Something had stayed. He was the last of his squad, the only one left to remember the truth about what had occurred at the facility. As he walked across the cooling desert, his mind raced like a ping-pong ball, his body heavy and filled with hatred and sadness.
“What the fuck was that...? We weren’t sent to save anyone, let alone contain anything... All my friends - Charlie... Freeman..."
Back home, Sergeant Marcus Hale was a shell of who he’d been. Fellow soldiers were amazed he survived. Though internally he struggled to cope with the fact that he had lived while his entire squad perished during the operation. Official reports claimed Echo Squad perished during “containment operations.” No mention of Hale, Charlie, or any of his fallen brothers. No mention of aliens. No mention of the nuclear strike that turned miles of desert to glass. The U.S government buried it all under layers of redacted files and black ink. Nothing was released to the public. Survivors vanished, with some being transferred to secret facilities and others having coincidental accidents. Hale was quietly discharged for “medical reasons” and given a folded flag. That was their way of showing gratitude for his service and keeping him quiet.
He went home to his small apartment, no job, no friends, no support. The walls didn’t move, but in his mind, they crawled. Every night, he saw his friends' grins disappear in flames. Nightmares woke him, watching his friends being ripped into pieces and begging for help. Begging to go home. Every morning he woke expecting another alarm, another mission, another order that never came. Even though the world has seemingly moved on, Hale didn’t. Local news companies reported strange lights in the desert; conspiracies about government clean-ups, mysterious chain-link fences that appeared overnight, and the disappearances of scientists, researchers, and even soldiers. Whole regions are closed off and guarded by soldiers and police as unexpected portal storms begin to appear over the New Mexico desert.
Hale lived like a shadow, drifting between bars, halfway houses, and falling behind on bills. He turned to drugs and alcohol as a means to cope with his reality. Ignoring calls from his family and friends... they just didn't understand. Sworn to secrecy, not that he could even tell them anything. Behind Hale's cold eyes, he dreamed of silence. Something to put an end to the trauma he had seen, forget his friends who he'd lost, and the massacre he had taken part in. Every so often, he’d reach for a pistol that wasn’t there, or flinch at the flicker of a fluorescent bulb that looked too much like a portal's glow. Going to that familiar bridge every night and standing on the edge - looking hundreds of feet below - maybe this was a good way to end the nightmares?
One night, sitting alone in a diner on the outskirts of town, a man in a black suit stepped out of a car with no plates. He walked with a purpose, his back straight and his silence unbroken. His eyes, cold, calculated, analytical - met Hale’s. They stared at each other through a window - a moment of silence was shadowed in mystery and unease before the figure got back in his car and drove away.
"Who the fuck was that?" He'd thought.
Was this a government agent coming to make him disappear for good, like the other survivors? Hale quickly packed up his bags and went into hiding. Seemingly vanishing from society and falling off the face of the earth. It is here he found safety in the Oklahoma woods, where he was able to take refuge during the events of the portal storms and the Seven-Hour War.
The old world had long since collapsed by the time Sergeant Marcus Hale reappeared. Not even the Combine could locate every single person hidden amongst the ruins of civilization and the fallout of the Seven-Hour War. He retreated to the Oklahoma countryside, deep in the wooded hills North of Oklahoma City, where roads had long turned to dirt and disrepair. Little did Hale realize that he would eventually lay down the foundations of a community and the most important trading hub within Oklahoma. Dubbing it Oakwood Hills.
Oakwood Hills
Population: 532
Location: Meridan, Oklahoma
Oakwood Hills originally started as an old barn with a barely functional generator. However, as the years passed, a vibrant community had grown. Carpenters built homes, and a power grid was even set up. Among them are even veterans of the U.S. military who had survived the Seven-Hour War, along with deserter conscripts and Civil Protection officers. Refugees, traders, and smugglers reside within the community, and life within the community is socialist in nature. Everything is shared. Life in Oakwood Hills is both challenging and straightforward, as residents grow crops and tend to livestock on a daily basis. Old-world machinery is highly sought after and scavenged to suit their desire for expansion and to improve the quality of life. Hale's men are primarily composed of experienced soldiers and former Civil Protection officers from both the old world and the new world, providing them with insight into Combine tactics. They are often seen patrolling the surrounding hills and countryside to scout for patrols and combine hunters, who are eventually engaged and destroyed. They are entirely self-sustaining, and the town is extremely wealthy. Bartering for food, ammunition, weapons, fuel, medicine, and other various items is commonplace within its walls as traders have set up shops and stands along the paths. Oakwood Hills has since become a safe haven for traders, deserters, and refugees alike seeking refuge from the Combine and the vast American wasteland in which they live.
Hale and the people of Oakwood Hills despise Gordon Freeman and the Lambda movement, as well as any groups that support them. With their leader being a former H.E.C.U Marine involved in the Black Mesa incident, he has never forgotten about what Freeman did to his men and the hell he unleashed upon the world. Hale has since sent several of his own men as scouts to look for Freeman, so that he may finally kill him as he originally intended to back at Black Mesa. To the Oakwood Hills community, Freeman was the spark that had set the world on fire and had resulted in the deaths of untold billions of people, and the Black Mesa Incident. A man who had single-handedly destroyed the world, unleashing hell upon the planet, and damning humanity to eternal slavery by the Combine. Whenever rebel patrols wander too close bearing the Lambda mark or any mark of a group aligned with them, Hale’s men do not hesitate to turn them away. Some are warned, may receive warning shots, and an unknown few are even killed for refusing to abide by their demands.
May 16, 2001...
A call comes directly from the Pentagon. Sergeant Marcus Hale, a Marine with the H.E.C.U. unit, is on standby at Santego Military Base in Arizona. The briefing was kept short as usual; it contained the details of a biohazard outbreak at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. No context, no real warnings. Their job was simple on paper: rescue survivors and restore order. With Hale heading to the armory, grabbing his equipment and rifle before boarding an Osprey with a dozen other men in his squadron dubbed 'Echo Squad'.
By the time their Ospreys cut across the desert and the sprawling complex came into view, Hale could already see smoke climbing into the air - thick, black, and twisting upwards into the skyline. At first glance, the facility appeared to be on fire, though nobody knew what was really happening. As their Osprey hovered over the facility and they attached their rappelling gear, the Marines proceeded according to plan, starting with a slow descent into the facility. Hale, his closest friend, Corporal Charlie Ramirez, and the rest of Echo Squad set down at one of the surface compounds. Within minutes, the operation unravels. They’d gone in expecting a chemical spill or maybe a weaponized virus. What they found made no sense. Their first contact occurred in the corridors of Sector C... creatures and various alien life forms ambushed them, appearing out of nowhere and ripping through marines before anyone could even fire back. Hale and Charlie pushed through the chaos, using grenades and endless magazines of ammunition to claw out a perimeter. Every corner revealed another nightmare - headcrabs, vortigaunts, zombies, bullsquids, and houndeyes. It felt less like combat and more like a descent into hell itself.
Radio chatter grew desperate. Orders blurred. “Contain the situation. Neutralize all witnesses.” At first, Hale didn't question it. Soldiers within H.E.C.U rarely did due to their training and expertise. But when he and Charlie had stumbled across a group of terrified scientists pleading for help... and their lives... something inside them shifted. Charlie lowered his rifle, and Hale didn’t stop him. They left the scientists alive. Perhaps it was a mistake, but who cares? They knew the odds of them making it out of the facility alive were comical at best. Hours seemingly bled together in a haze of gunfire, screams, and flickering lights. The deeper Echo Squad went into the facility, the worse things seemed to get. Strange green beams of plasma pulsed through the walls. Portals cracked open midair. They saw men vanish into violet light, even dragged through portals to an unknown fate.
Hiding amongst the maze of laboratories, they got new orders: capture a rogue scientist named Gordon Freeman. Command said he caused all of it. At this point, Hale didn’t care who was to blame anymore, and they hunted Freeman through corridors caked with blood. Each time they closed in, he slipped away again, like he knew the facility better than anyone else. Was it luck? How has he managed to evade capture for so long? Above all else, Hale saw what Freeman left behind... wrecked turrets, dead marines and friends, and a seemingly endless path of destruction. To him, Freeman was a murderer, a man who had slain a dozen or more of his fellow brothers on his path of destruction. Hale wanted Freeman dead, even to personally carry out his execution, forget capture... this was personal.
Hours later, priorities shifted. They forgot about Freeman and focused on surviving and evacuating the facility. By then, Echo Squad was down to five men remaining, and Hale had assumed command. The rest of his troops, including their former squad leader, had been torn apart by various xenian creatures or dragged away whole into portals of unknown origin. When they reached the lower maintenance levels - dark, damp, and reeking of death, destruction, and rot - everything fell apart. As they began making their way to a freight elevator, the ground suddenly split open beneath them. A massive Gargantua crawled from the crevice, firing flames from its pincers, reaching out and grabbing a marine, cutting him in half. Desperate, they made a run for the elevator, beginning to ascend before the cables snapped. Two more men plummeted below and vanished into the darkness. Hale and Charlie, who had managed to jump off, fought back to back, weapons overheating, and grenades rattling across the floor. The explosions echoed in the infested hallways, and flashes of orange and white light filled their room.
Then came the sound - a deep, low hum as another portal split open behind them. An untold number of headcrabs poured through, and zombified scientists shambled through the corridors, charging at them like a living tide. Charlie shoved Hale toward an emergency ladder. “Go! I’ll cover you!” he shouted, his M249 blasting headcrabs and zombies to pieces as the barrel glowed red hot. Hale froze. "I can't leave you, not like this!" He exclaimed. Time seemingly freezing, Charlie turned his head to be met with one final push. "Get the hell out of here - Now, Hale!" - one look in Charlie’s eyes said everything. He wouldn't be coming with him. Hale ran for the ladder and grabbed onto it, beginning his ascent... The ammunition in Charlie's machine gun ran dry soon afterwards. He grabbed a grenade and yanked the pin, its spool pinging off in a separate direction as headcrabs jumped and latched onto his body... Zombified scientists slashed away at his flesh... Charlie screamed as he was ripped to pieces... and then BOOOM! The blast turned the corridor white... then silent. Hale climbed until his arms burned, tears mixing with blood and grime. His squad and all of his friends were gone.
By the time he reached the surface, total anarchy had set in, and all order had collapsed. Air support was gone. Communications were crippled. Scattered H.E.C.U squads even shot at one another out of panic and exhaustion. The Xenian fauna were everywhere, filling the canyons, devouring everything in their path; it was a bloodbath. He tried to raise command again and caught only fragments.
“...authorized cleanup... strategic device... evacuate immediately...”
Hearing this, he realized rescue wasn't coming... Hale quickly jumped into an abandoned Humvee and tore across the desert as fast as he could. A zombified scientist shambling across the road walked in his path... BLAM! It pinged over his hood and the top of his vehicle, leaving a trail of blood. The gas pedal slammed against the floorboard. He looked in the rearview mirror, the facility shrank behind him, engulfed in black smoke with jets engaged in dogfights with Manta Rays.
....Then came the flash....
The nuclear blast ripped the sky apart. The shockwave hit seconds later, flipping the Humvee and sending Hale hurling through the sand. When he awoke, his ears were ringing, and a mushroom cloud towered where Black Mesa once stood. The air shimmered with heat and ash.
In an instant, everybody and everything were gone. Any memory of his friend Charlie, his troops, or the facility was erased. Gone. As if they had never even existed. Hale lay there staring at the sky until the glow faded; nothing but fear and trauma loomed over him. The mission was over. Black Mesa was gone. "Did anyone else survive?" He wondered. Even though the area had just sustained a nuclear strike, strange phenomena occurred along the crater’s edge, strange lights still flickered - unnatural, seemingly alive. Something had survived. Something had stayed. He was the last of his squad, the only one left to remember the truth about what had occurred at the facility. As he walked across the cooling desert, his mind raced like a ping-pong ball, his body heavy and filled with hatred and sadness.
“What the fuck was that...? We weren’t sent to save anyone, let alone contain anything... All my friends - Charlie... Freeman..."
Back home, Sergeant Marcus Hale was a shell of who he’d been. Fellow soldiers were amazed he survived. Though internally he struggled to cope with the fact that he had lived while his entire squad perished during the operation. Official reports claimed Echo Squad perished during “containment operations.” No mention of Hale, Charlie, or any of his fallen brothers. No mention of aliens. No mention of the nuclear strike that turned miles of desert to glass. The U.S government buried it all under layers of redacted files and black ink. Nothing was released to the public. Survivors vanished, with some being transferred to secret facilities and others having coincidental accidents. Hale was quietly discharged for “medical reasons” and given a folded flag. That was their way of showing gratitude for his service and keeping him quiet.
He went home to his small apartment, no job, no friends, no support. The walls didn’t move, but in his mind, they crawled. Every night, he saw his friends' grins disappear in flames. Nightmares woke him, watching his friends being ripped into pieces and begging for help. Begging to go home. Every morning he woke expecting another alarm, another mission, another order that never came. Even though the world has seemingly moved on, Hale didn’t. Local news companies reported strange lights in the desert; conspiracies about government clean-ups, mysterious chain-link fences that appeared overnight, and the disappearances of scientists, researchers, and even soldiers. Whole regions are closed off and guarded by soldiers and police as unexpected portal storms begin to appear over the New Mexico desert.
Hale lived like a shadow, drifting between bars, halfway houses, and falling behind on bills. He turned to drugs and alcohol as a means to cope with his reality. Ignoring calls from his family and friends... they just didn't understand. Sworn to secrecy, not that he could even tell them anything. Behind Hale's cold eyes, he dreamed of silence. Something to put an end to the trauma he had seen, forget his friends who he'd lost, and the massacre he had taken part in. Every so often, he’d reach for a pistol that wasn’t there, or flinch at the flicker of a fluorescent bulb that looked too much like a portal's glow. Going to that familiar bridge every night and standing on the edge - looking hundreds of feet below - maybe this was a good way to end the nightmares?
One night, sitting alone in a diner on the outskirts of town, a man in a black suit stepped out of a car with no plates. He walked with a purpose, his back straight and his silence unbroken. His eyes, cold, calculated, analytical - met Hale’s. They stared at each other through a window - a moment of silence was shadowed in mystery and unease before the figure got back in his car and drove away.
"Who the fuck was that?" He'd thought.
Was this a government agent coming to make him disappear for good, like the other survivors? Hale quickly packed up his bags and went into hiding. Seemingly vanishing from society and falling off the face of the earth. It is here he found safety in the Oklahoma woods, where he was able to take refuge during the events of the portal storms and the Seven-Hour War.
The old world had long since collapsed by the time Sergeant Marcus Hale reappeared. Not even the Combine could locate every single person hidden amongst the ruins of civilization and the fallout of the Seven-Hour War. He retreated to the Oklahoma countryside, deep in the wooded hills North of Oklahoma City, where roads had long turned to dirt and disrepair. Little did Hale realize that he would eventually lay down the foundations of a community and the most important trading hub within Oklahoma. Dubbing it Oakwood Hills.
Oakwood Hills
Population: 532
Location: Meridan, Oklahoma
Oakwood Hills originally started as an old barn with a barely functional generator. However, as the years passed, a vibrant community had grown. Carpenters built homes, and a power grid was even set up. Among them are even veterans of the U.S. military who had survived the Seven-Hour War, along with deserter conscripts and Civil Protection officers. Refugees, traders, and smugglers reside within the community, and life within the community is socialist in nature. Everything is shared. Life in Oakwood Hills is both challenging and straightforward, as residents grow crops and tend to livestock on a daily basis. Old-world machinery is highly sought after and scavenged to suit their desire for expansion and to improve the quality of life. Hale's men are primarily composed of experienced soldiers and former Civil Protection officers from both the old world and the new world, providing them with insight into Combine tactics. They are often seen patrolling the surrounding hills and countryside to scout for patrols and combine hunters, who are eventually engaged and destroyed. They are entirely self-sustaining, and the town is extremely wealthy. Bartering for food, ammunition, weapons, fuel, medicine, and other various items is commonplace within its walls as traders have set up shops and stands along the paths. Oakwood Hills has since become a safe haven for traders, deserters, and refugees alike seeking refuge from the Combine and the vast American wasteland in which they live.
Hale and the people of Oakwood Hills despise Gordon Freeman and the Lambda movement, as well as any groups that support them. With their leader being a former H.E.C.U Marine involved in the Black Mesa incident, he has never forgotten about what Freeman did to his men and the hell he unleashed upon the world. Hale has since sent several of his own men as scouts to look for Freeman, so that he may finally kill him as he originally intended to back at Black Mesa. To the Oakwood Hills community, Freeman was the spark that had set the world on fire and had resulted in the deaths of untold billions of people, and the Black Mesa Incident. A man who had single-handedly destroyed the world, unleashing hell upon the planet, and damning humanity to eternal slavery by the Combine. Whenever rebel patrols wander too close bearing the Lambda mark or any mark of a group aligned with them, Hale’s men do not hesitate to turn them away. Some are warned, may receive warning shots, and an unknown few are even killed for refusing to abide by their demands.