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Certain parts of Black Mesa had the distilled feel of a place arrested in the early days of the Cold War, and then summarily abandoned. Barney both hated and loved straying by those places. One of his pet projects was combing through old government projects that had been shut down and unearthed decades later. Black Mesa featured pretty heavily in the projects from the early 50s.
Once he managed to go to some of the old propulsion labs with another guard, who had been dispatched to check out a warning light that shouldn't have been active, since it had been decommissioned 50 years ago. He could practically feel his blood humming in anticipation as they unsealed one of the old doors. It smelled like oil and concrete and fuel. But the offices to the labs were another matter, dim in the gray light, smelling of floor polish. Somehow dust hadn't collected, and the archival dryness of the desert must have played a part, but in Barney's half superstitious mind, he knew that even dust had been banished here in this monument of strange application of humanity's greatest pursuits.
Staplers still lay on desks where they were last used. Pencils were in cups. As they walked by a desk, Barney reached over to try a drawer, and startled himself when it glided open with a tug. They both stopped and watched as it opened silently under its own weight, showing old manila folders crammed with papers. He felt himself start to sweat. Smith, the other guard, silently tagged him with a warning swat to his arm, shook his head, and then jerked it back to the door they had been headed to. Barney nudged the door shut, and reached up to the desk to touch a metal protractor. He could hear Smith walking away, and after a brief struggle with some superstitious internal impulse, snatched a no. 2 pencil from the cup on the desk and jammed it in the cargo pocket on his leg.
They found the light. It was for a personnel emergency, lit up on one of the old security checkpoints. Here in the checkpoint, there seemed to be a fine film of something across the surfaces, and Smith had to rub it away to squint at the label. It was a light for the labs they had just passed through. Barney felt a little chill ripple across his skin. He didn't believe in ghosts, not really, but he wondered sometimes if maybe places like Black Mesa, infused with energy as they were, kept the echoes of stressful events trapped between their walls. Barney reached past Smith to the little pegboard on the cement wall, where a number of manual override keys were dangling. He selected the one labeled with the lab, and carefully slotted it into the keyhole next to the alarm.
Before he turned it, he looked to Smith. "Should we give it one last look? Just in case?"
Smith looked at him as though he were crazy. "We just walked through there, man. There's no personnel."
They both paused, as though waiting, before Smith let out a long sigh. "Yeah, I guess. Could be some white coat got lost wandering." They both knew this was extremely unlikely. It was possible someone might have gotten into trouble while looking for some old equipment or paperwork, but the science personnel normally always took a guard as an escort. Barney didn't even know if anyone's access badges even worked out here.
They made their way back to the lab, checking closets and old lounges, dark corners where someone may have propped themselves. The lab was as eerily untouched as before, but Smith and Barney split up, fanning out between the desks to check the far corners of the room. Barney followed a short corridor to the old employee lounge. An old coffee maker stood on a counter. The dimness and silence seemed watchful. It made the hair on Barney's arms stand on end.
There was no one.
They regrouped in the lab, and made their way back to the security checkpoint, and Barney twisted the key in the override slot, and the light went out. Smith gave a small sigh, as though relieved. Some old ghosts needed to be left alone. Barney was glad he wasn't alone in thinking this. Smith broke up the silence by digging around in his uniform vest until he unearthed his notepad, scribbled down some details, saying aloud, as though to banish the specter of possibility that hovered around them, "Malfunctioning personnel emergency light in propulsion lab. Turned off with security override key." He shut his notepad with a little slap of finality, and then eyed Calhoun in the dark. "Ready?"
Barney gave him a nod, and they made their way out of the facility. The desert was inappropriately bright after the dusk of the labs, and but Barney was glad for the sound of the crunch of the hard scrabble under his boots.
He found Gordon later that evening, as he was finishing up his shift. The physicist was sitting in a little trafficked corridor, balancing a stack of folders on his knees while he scribbled formulae across a paper. He glanced up, eyes circled in dark, as Barney approached. Talk about specters. He grimaced at Gordon's appearance, and noted the thermos of coffee beside him.
"Working kind of late, huh Gordon?" Gordon shrugged in response, skinny shoulders hefting the lab coat.
Barney dug into his pants pocket and produced the pencil, the impulse he had earlier driving him to complete whatever weird little ritual this was. "Here."
A smile crossed Gordon's face as he took it. "A pencil? Thanks?"
Barney felt weird hovering like this, so he sat by Gordon, leaning back so he was propped against the wall, pushing his feet out before him. "Got it from the old propulsion lab," he confessed, keeping his tone light but needing to excise the weirdness of the excursion. "Odd place. Staplers and protractors and pens and pencils still on the desks. Like it's just waiting for the science personnel to come back." He glanced over to Gordon, who was now turning the pencil over in his fingers, studying it.
"There's protocol for that, you know," Gordon offered, after a second of silence. "I read it in the on-boarding handbook. In case of a sudden arrest in research, all materiel lies in situ." The words had a distinctly government slant, but they felt like a ritual.
Barney nodded, maybe for a beat too long, in lieu of saying anything. What could he say. Lab felt haunted? Felt like the place was caked in the fear of nuclear bomb drops? Fortunately, Gordon seemed to have intuited at least some of this, and he sent Barney a slanted, thin-mouth smile. "The old labs are spooky," he said simply, and lifted the thermos to take a sip directly out of it.
Barney grimaced. "What the hell is in there."
As Gordon brought the thermos down, he had a similar grimace on his face. "Coffee. Mostly. And some caffeine powder."
Barney groaned. "Oh god, Gordon. Is your heart gonna explode?"
Gordon shrugged summarily, looking back down to his paper of proofs, and lifted the pencil Barney had given him to trace down his line of logic to find where he had left off. "I dunno. Maybe. At least I could finally go to sleep." He checked his watch and made a face. "Look, I'm starved, and you're probably sort of freaked out because you haven't eaten dinner. Let's grab something."
Barney finally chuckled and sighed. "Yeah, sure. Why not. Least I can make sure you don't have a heart attack." But his eyes lingered on the pencil for a minute, as Gordon began gathering his papers.
He couldn't shake the feeling of the lab for the rest of the night.