Joãozinho

João Vinícius Abreu, Joãozinho to his friends, was born in the year 1996 in Belo Horizonte, and his parents hoped very much to see him take up his father's mantle and become the latest in a proud line of Abreu architects. When he was three his grandmother took him to the Museum Ciências Nturais, and when she came home said that they had better get ready for a little scientist instead. When he was three and a half his father took him to see the Museu de História Natural Jardim Botânico, and came home saying as much himself. Nobody ever really expects what a child is at such a young age to stick with them for all of their lives, but there was such a joy about Joãozinho among the exhibitions that the family thought it best they prepare for the future early. And why not? The family had always held education in high regard; why not pursue it further?

When Joãozinho was four, they sat down to teach him to read in earnest, and maybe learn a little Spanish or English while he was at it. Start them young and they learn well, that was what all the studies said. He learned quickly, maybe too quickly sometimes for his family to keep up, but it was all right. They smiled.

When Joãozinho was just about five the monsters came and the world began to tear itself apart. It would be a long time before anyone got answers, and the Americans admitted that it started with them. Joãozinho did not much notice and did not much care whose fault it was. He wanted his father back. That was not going to happen, although in the years ahead he would wonder a little about the horrified pale look on his mother's face the day of the gunshot and the corpse with the crab-thing over its head.

But only a little. He was still a boy then, a small one, even if his grandfather took him aside and started to teach him to use the family guns himself and said he was going to have to be a man now. The army could not protect them enough, not from the creatures that came out of the air when the world warped and the sky tore open, so they were going to have to be men and do it themselves. And the women were going to have to do it, too, even his little sister who was too small to hold a gun yet; she was going to learn to hit things with bats and clubs and tools of any kind. All of them were. Every day they would practice, when there were not other lessons, and so they would keep the family safe. Maybe the other families around them, too, if they were lucky. If they were good enough. And they were, for a time, the safest family in Belo Horizonte.

When João was nine the Citadel slammed into being in the heart of São Paulo and even the monsters had other things to worry about. It was somewhat after noon then. By the time it was dark it was over, for all the army's trying and for all Vovô Abreu's defiance. One of the scrambling things that looked like a clawed frog ripped him apart; he died shouting words that João had never heard used in polite company before. He would remember them a long time, even after everyone left alive in Belo Horizonte was carted off to São Paulo and set to work, regardless of age or health or strength.

He did not stay in São Paulo long. The Combine taskmasters saw there were dangers in keeping families together, or even only keeping people from the same city in the same place. By the time João was fifteen he had been sent to live and labor in three other cities. When he was sixteen the taskmaster in Cidade Oitenta must have taken note of him, because the masked police began to pay him visits. Not to threaten, but to ask him about his skills, about his interests. Did he want to serve the people of Cidade Oitenta more directly, make sure they were safe? Would he like a better life than digging foundations and repairing crumbling buildings? They could do that for him. They could do more, if he wanted, if he was willing.

He took their information and he went with them later to see about the position, and they tested him and took off their masks and smiled at him, and for a while it looked as if he was going to have a very good place indeed. But two days after he was given their uniform and their weapon he was nowhere to be found in Cidade Oitenta, and since the machines they sent to scan for runaways in the deep wilderness often did not come back at all, they did not try very hard to find him again. They only marked his name down on a list of anti-citizens and offered a reward should he show his face again anywhere that civilized people lived.

João was a city boy, and had no clue of where he was once he escaped from Cidade Oitenta. He was in the north somewhere, that was all he knew for certain. He was sick and starving and nearly broken when he staggered out of the mountains and into the Wayana encampment along the Maroni river. In the old days the Wayana had been natives and tribesmen only. The ones who had survived the First Days had learned to fight the headcrabs and the spitting beasts and every other horror that spilled out of holes in the air. The ones who survived the Combine's coming had learned to keep well hidden and not let any word of their existence escape; you joined, or you died. João was a quick learner and did not much want to die, and so he stayed and joined them.

It was an interesting existence and it was better than nothing, and when new people escaped from the Combine he did his best to help them integrate. They raided the Combine supplies where they could and destroyed as many Combine machines as they felt they could get away with, and for a while the knowledge that something surely existed beyond the Combine's reach gave the people of Cidade Oitenta hope. The thought of a refuge in Old Amapá was a nearer thing and a more easily grasped one than the thought of Gordon Freeman's return, although- if people were honest- both were equally slim chances. They were hopes to be grasped at, but not held onto too hard, for fear that grasping too hard would break them.

And then. Oh, and then.

The first sign that something was different was the day that came when João was twenty-five and looked at a woman, really looked at a woman. It was... not something he had expected, or she, for that matter. Some days later there came word from a raiding party that it was happening elsewhere, too, that there were people finding themselves behaving as they hadn't done since the days before the Combine. When an infiltrator finally made it back to the Tumucumaque refuge from Cidade Oitenta she said there was rioting in the city, that the broadcasts the Combine stooge in America sent all the time had been replaced with other speakers, that Gordon Freeman had returned and the Suppression Field was cast down. The Combine were in trouble at last...

They went on the offensive as best they could, though it was still difficult. One used what weapons one could manage and there were not nearly as many in their hands as they would like, but still they tried. And they did very well, for a time, considering. But the day came when the Combine grew serious, and struck with the kind of force João had not seen in many years. By the time they were done the Wayana refuge in Tumucumaque had been found and emptied, not only of men and women but of plants and animals, and carted off to God alone knew where to God alone knew what fate; and João was among them.

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.