Baphomet!
The flashbang went off inside the large room.
Everyone's ears rang as they rushed through the rear door.
Inside, the Combine hideout was a hideous mess. It was a large, open square area. Cases and equipment lay scattered on one side of the room, on the other were bunk beds. The dead lay all over the place. The Combine Black Hat infiltrators were missing part of all of their heads, obviously, someone had triggered their "headbanger" chips! The mercenaries they'd hired were all dead, most were shot up. Some were crushed, others in the kitchen area stabbed each other with the knives and utensils lying around.
The surviving Automaton had been taken out, then blown up by its internal deadman's booby-trap. One particularly large Black Hat, an obvious cyborg in a Confederate officer's uniform, staggered around, his eyes a sickly puke-green, then his head exploded in a shower of blood, bone, grey matter and circuitry. A Black Hat command board dropped from his lifeless fingers. Jane, a former Black Hat herself, was startled to realise she recognised the man. It was Jonas Phelps, a former CSA commando officer that had become one of the Black Hat's most fearsome commanders. He was her former commander in the Black Hats. Since she had escaped the Combine, Phelps had apparently come here to Junkyard and commanded efforts by Combine infiltrators and their mercenary allies. For some reason he'd used his Combine command board to activate the Headbanger chips in most of his mens' heads to kill them. Then triggered his own!
It wasn't hard to tell what had caused much of the other damage, death and destruction, including that of the Automaton. The Russian Drone was currently busy with crushing the head of the last surviving non-Combine mercenary. His screams filled the dank metal chamber, then ended in a CRACK!
