São Jerônimo
What the Combine plans to do with them, João isn't exactly sure. But he knows this much: there are more people here than he's seen in one place since he left Belo Horizonte all those years ago, and none of them have any room to move. You don't pack anything alive into space this small unless you don't intend for it to be alive much longer. If there was room to fight, any room to struggle for escape, he would, but here there is barely room to breathe. Somewhere he can hear a high thin voice wailing- a woman maybe, or a young man of the last generation born. He can't tell. It doesn't matter.
For someone who fought the Xen things before he was old enough to shave, for someone who escaped the Combine on foot and survived the kunana ritual to join the Wayana, he thinks bitterly, this is such a stupid way to end.
There's no light here. Whether it's night and the Combine don't bother to light their victims' final hours, or it's daytime and they're trapped in a room with no windows, he doesn't know. Again, it doesn't matter. They were stampeded in here, the doors were slammed behind them, they've been locked in here for longer than he cares to think about, and.... and. If there is anything beyond that 'and' he doesn't know about it.
It would be nice if the Combine would at least send one of their soldiers in here before the end. Someone he could die trying to strangle, instead of going down in the dark, unknowing, like cattle. He'd like to live up to Vovô Abreu's final example.
A puff of air brushes against his face, stirring his hair briefly. It takes him a moment to realize it's not someone's breath- it's a breeze, it's wind. Someone has opened a door...
The others in there with him realize it around the same time, and the shouting starts. How it doesn't turn into a grand melee he doesn't know. Probably someone winds up trampled anyway, it's the kind of thing that happens under the circumstances, but- well, it doesn't matter. Not when in the end the light is only just enough to show that the great doors the Combine herded them all in through are cracked open not by masked Combine soldiers but by armed humans. They carry Combine guns but they wear the lambda that marks Resistance fighters, and they...
... apparently don't speak a word of Portuguese. Or even of local Spanish dialects. They've been rescued by Mexicans.
It takes a while to find the right translators to shake everything out. The Mexicans are part of a larger Resistance group come down from the States. They report to Gordon Freeman- they fought under him in the field today- and to Alyx Vance, the woman who leads all the Resistance in the States. The Combine have been rounding people up not only here in Brazil, not only to punish the rebels, but to feed them to their horrible creations. The Amazon was called the lungs of the world once. The Combine were subverting those lungs, cutting down trees and humans alike to feed every living thing in their path into the guts of a thing called a gene worm, to force it to grow huge and quickly. What air it breathed in came out unfit for any living creature of Earth- but ideal for the Combine race and all their filthy creations.
Here, in what was once Chapada dos Guimarães- at the very top of São Jerônimo, in the place people of the past had thought aliens would one day land to share their wisdom with the people of Earth- they had placed one of these things years ago. When Gordon Freeman had destroyed the Citadel in Cidade Dezessete, the Combine had scattered like ants from a kicked hill- and regrouped like ants in a rage, dragging everything and everyone they could to the gene worms to speed up their destruction. There were many who had been brought to São Jerônimo who would never be seen again, but that was going to stop now. The Mexicans want to show them, all of them, so that each and every person here knows what came to pass.
It's a slow walk. There are a lot of people, and the structure the Combine built to house and shelter the thing while it did its work is enormous, like some sick cathedral to all that's wrong with the world. They have to move in slowly because there are only so many gas masks to go around; the gases the worm put out still linger, and may be a problem for some time to come. But eventually one of the Mexicans- Manuel Redondo, he says his name is- eventually one of them hands João a gas mask and walks with him and the others into a room with the biggest corpse João has ever seen.
The thing is monstrously bloated, bigger than trees, than buses, than buildings. All tentacles and machine encrustations, a pipe as wide as any oil pipeline crammed into its maw, it takes up so much room he can't quite comprehend it. He looks upward and realizes with a shiver that the ceiling here is easily as far up as the roof of the Acaiaca Building had been- as high as the JK Building was, once. Thirty floors, maybe forty. That's how big the monster was supposed to get, fed on the bodies of every living thing the Combine could get their hands on. How big it is now he can't say, and doesn't want to, but... it's dead now, slumped in a heap like something washed up on the riverbank and left in the sun to rot as the waters recede.
But there are no wounds on it that he can see, no sign of explosion or gunfire or electrocution. Things that big don't just die for no reason. He turns to his Mexican companion and asks, slowly and hesitantly- it's been years since he's had to speak much Spanish- what it was that brought the thing down.
If Redondo is smiling behind the gas mask João can't tell. All he knows for sure is that the man holds up a vial perhaps half the size of a human head, and says with some satisfaction that they have very, very clever scientists on their side.
For someone who fought the Xen things before he was old enough to shave, for someone who escaped the Combine on foot and survived the kunana ritual to join the Wayana, he thinks bitterly, this is such a stupid way to end.
There's no light here. Whether it's night and the Combine don't bother to light their victims' final hours, or it's daytime and they're trapped in a room with no windows, he doesn't know. Again, it doesn't matter. They were stampeded in here, the doors were slammed behind them, they've been locked in here for longer than he cares to think about, and.... and. If there is anything beyond that 'and' he doesn't know about it.
It would be nice if the Combine would at least send one of their soldiers in here before the end. Someone he could die trying to strangle, instead of going down in the dark, unknowing, like cattle. He'd like to live up to Vovô Abreu's final example.
A puff of air brushes against his face, stirring his hair briefly. It takes him a moment to realize it's not someone's breath- it's a breeze, it's wind. Someone has opened a door...
The others in there with him realize it around the same time, and the shouting starts. How it doesn't turn into a grand melee he doesn't know. Probably someone winds up trampled anyway, it's the kind of thing that happens under the circumstances, but- well, it doesn't matter. Not when in the end the light is only just enough to show that the great doors the Combine herded them all in through are cracked open not by masked Combine soldiers but by armed humans. They carry Combine guns but they wear the lambda that marks Resistance fighters, and they...
... apparently don't speak a word of Portuguese. Or even of local Spanish dialects. They've been rescued by Mexicans.
It takes a while to find the right translators to shake everything out. The Mexicans are part of a larger Resistance group come down from the States. They report to Gordon Freeman- they fought under him in the field today- and to Alyx Vance, the woman who leads all the Resistance in the States. The Combine have been rounding people up not only here in Brazil, not only to punish the rebels, but to feed them to their horrible creations. The Amazon was called the lungs of the world once. The Combine were subverting those lungs, cutting down trees and humans alike to feed every living thing in their path into the guts of a thing called a gene worm, to force it to grow huge and quickly. What air it breathed in came out unfit for any living creature of Earth- but ideal for the Combine race and all their filthy creations.
Here, in what was once Chapada dos Guimarães- at the very top of São Jerônimo, in the place people of the past had thought aliens would one day land to share their wisdom with the people of Earth- they had placed one of these things years ago. When Gordon Freeman had destroyed the Citadel in Cidade Dezessete, the Combine had scattered like ants from a kicked hill- and regrouped like ants in a rage, dragging everything and everyone they could to the gene worms to speed up their destruction. There were many who had been brought to São Jerônimo who would never be seen again, but that was going to stop now. The Mexicans want to show them, all of them, so that each and every person here knows what came to pass.
It's a slow walk. There are a lot of people, and the structure the Combine built to house and shelter the thing while it did its work is enormous, like some sick cathedral to all that's wrong with the world. They have to move in slowly because there are only so many gas masks to go around; the gases the worm put out still linger, and may be a problem for some time to come. But eventually one of the Mexicans- Manuel Redondo, he says his name is- eventually one of them hands João a gas mask and walks with him and the others into a room with the biggest corpse João has ever seen.
The thing is monstrously bloated, bigger than trees, than buses, than buildings. All tentacles and machine encrustations, a pipe as wide as any oil pipeline crammed into its maw, it takes up so much room he can't quite comprehend it. He looks upward and realizes with a shiver that the ceiling here is easily as far up as the roof of the Acaiaca Building had been- as high as the JK Building was, once. Thirty floors, maybe forty. That's how big the monster was supposed to get, fed on the bodies of every living thing the Combine could get their hands on. How big it is now he can't say, and doesn't want to, but... it's dead now, slumped in a heap like something washed up on the riverbank and left in the sun to rot as the waters recede.
But there are no wounds on it that he can see, no sign of explosion or gunfire or electrocution. Things that big don't just die for no reason. He turns to his Mexican companion and asks, slowly and hesitantly- it's been years since he's had to speak much Spanish- what it was that brought the thing down.
If Redondo is smiling behind the gas mask João can't tell. All he knows for sure is that the man holds up a vial perhaps half the size of a human head, and says with some satisfaction that they have very, very clever scientists on their side.