September 21, 2036
Riley,
God, if anyone ever read this, they would probably think I was crazy. But, I dont know, I guess it makes it easier. Just thinking that maybe you are out there somewhere, hearing this, hearing me, makes it just that much easier. I think to myself about what it would be like if you were standing here with me, instead of, wherever it is you may be. We never really talked much about it did we, what we thought really happened to you when... you know, the time came. I like to think that maybe there is a place that they talk about, a place in the sky where our loved ones wait for us to be reunited. But the things I've seen, all make it clear. Wherever it is we end up, after we leave here, cant be a kingdom in the sky. Because if a place like that existed, why would anyone want to remain here? I guess it really doesn't fucking matter, listen to me. I sound... like an idiot. The friends I've made are an okay bunch, no matter where it is that they come from. The wasteland has worn on them just like it has the rest of us, and everyone does what they have to in order to survive. I haven't told them yet, about what I am, I haven't told anyone. Tommy and Joel think... that it would make people doubtful, weary. That maybe they wouldn't understand, and I get that, but I hate, thinking that I'm living a lie. Sometimes I feel isolated, like I really can't tell anyone, I like to think that they wouldn't see me any differently, but I just dont know. You'd probably see things differently than I do, but time it seems, has changed me more than even I know. I just hope that wherever you are your proud of the person that I am, the person this world has made me. I do better and better every day, with Joel at my side. He says we're not like them, not like the Hunters, thieves, cannibals, that still live outside of our walls. He likes to think that we who live here, are finding a way to live better. But, he might not see things the way I do, he's known was life could be. All I've ever known is this... The Wasteland.
Is that All I Am Riley? Is that all that people like me are destined to become? ... Fuck It I Guess.
I Love You Riley, Endure and Survive.
-Ellie
-We, The Wasteland-
Chapter 2: The House Of Wolves
Ellie has again taken to whistling as the two approach the gate, Trent raising his weapon into the air signaling the men posted that the two are friendly. They shoot a salute to the two as they pass. The town has come a long ways in the two years that Ellie and Joel have been living here, taking in new refugees almost weekly as the Quarantine Zones began to fall. It would have made sense Ellie thought, that with the ratio of infected to Human was getting more and more one sided that most of the destruction reaped by CBI would have subsided. But it seemed to have only gotten worse. Tommy and Maria had set up a checkpoint inside the North gate, a sign sat above the door, "Welcome Home." written across its length. There was a line of new refugees standing outside, their faces dirty, bruised, the look of the wasteland painted on. Standing behind them was Tommy's friend, Carl, a tall, thin man in a red checkered flannel. He pushed up his glasses as he placed the CBI Detection Device to his face, green across the board.
"How many we get this time?" Trent yells over.
"What you see is what you get?" Carl replies with a shake of his head.
Trenton thinks for a moment, considering the trade waiting for him back at the house, Nick no doubt would have some slick shit to say if he let him know he'd found a pack of cigarettes anyways. He shook his head, digging the pack from his pocket, tossing them to Carl.
"Let'em take the edge off." He said as Carl caught the pack of smokes, nodding his head thoughtfully.
Behind his back, Ellie smiled at Trent. For everything that he was, an asshole, a jackass, and one of the worst cases the wasteland ever produced, his time here had turned him into as much of a humanitarian as the times would allow, sure he had his moments, but moments like this, really showed who he was. He turned back to Ellie, catching her smiling at him.
"What?"
"Thought you wanted that Record?" She teased.
He smirked, shaking his head, clicking again as the horse started forward. "Its not goin' anywhere."
As they made their way through the camp they could see that The Lodge was filling up, the younger kids of the settlement really liked movie night. But the only way to obtain movies being making runs into the surrounding villages, new movies were getting more and more difficult to come by. Maria stood on the porch, next to a blonde haired woman by the name of Brianne, Bree for short.
"Ellie, Joels lookin' for ya." She calls down to them from the porch.
"Yeah I bet he is." She said under her breath.
"He needs to know if your still on the west wall tonight."
"Yeah, I'm with Hannah." Ellie says, shaking her head as the two pass The Lodge.
"So your nights gonna be pretty long." Trent smiles.
"Tell me about it, fuck, I got a couple of hours, maybe I can catch a nap at the movie." She sighs.
"Your not gonna watch it with me?" Trent asks.
"A Hundred Times Trent, a hundred fucking times."
The two find their way passed the Cafe, a tiny diner set up by a couple almost a year ago. They had made it out of the wasteland with their two small children, they were so thankful to find a place like this, they decided to give a little back. They had been cooks for the Military for a number of years, trying to make it by anyway they could, but when the zones first started coming apart, they knew the military wouldn't be able to help them. A Couple days a week Ellie finds herself volunteering on the line, cooking, cleaning, anything she can. Edward and Pamela were good people, and it made her feel good to be able to help them.
"Hows the shop?" Trent asks.
"Its alright, they're gonna freak when they see this fella'" Ellie says motioning to the deer dragging just behind their horses.
"Yeah... they sure are." Trent nods.
The two make their way into the neighborhood, as the older folks have come to call it, the settlement had been split up into four parts, the Market, used primarily for the Diner, A Couple stores, a brewery, a bakery, The makeshift hospital, and The Lodge movie theatre. The Gray quarter, used for the storage of weapons, and various items needed for survival in the wilderness. The Dam, where most of the towns power came from, save for the generators set up in a few of the houses as well as the hospital. And the Green Quarter, which was used for the housing of the people of the settlement, Ellie herself took pretty well to gardening, growing vegetables when the season was in. She and a couple of the other ladies of the town had been at it all summer, grown enough to last until they could get their indoor grow-house set up.
The house at the end of the street was put up specifically for Ellie's group of friends, contracted by Trent and Nick and put together by the six of them. It was a two story house with a huge front porch, deer skulls hanging from the archway above the stairs leading up to the doorway, above a sign reads "The House of Wolves." The two hitch their horses to the post in front and head up the stairs. Inside is a madhouse, "Clint Eastwood" By The Gorillaz plays from a speaker system on the left side of the room, a couple couches and a chair surround a coffee table, the light from the tube television glowing across the faces of a red haired girl, a faded purple shirt and ripped black jeans, multi-colored high tops on her feet. Her friend, a black haired boy, wearing a fluffy black leather hoody, skinny jeans and combat boots. He throws the controller down.
"Thats bullshit!" He yells, standing up from the couch, The girl laughs as her charactor on the screen stands triumphantly over his.
"No, you just can't play no Tekken." She teases. Freeze Frame.
Zoey Ryback
Zoey is the local combat engineer, at least if you asked her thats how she would put it. During her seventeen years in the wasteland she had attended a military candidacy school in the Detroit QZ. Even getting as far as Sargent before the fall of the zone. Her unit was one of two to make it out of that place alive, and though the things she'd seen still echoed inside her head, you wouldn't have been able to tell. Her time in Jackson had brought her old self back, who she was before the military. She had training with High Explosives, the plaque above her room read simply, "The Original Daughter of Destruction." Her father, was one of the base commanders in Detroit, she had been one of the more high speed candidates in the school. She became the youngest combat engineer at age 14, using her skills in more than a few battles with the Fireflies.
Her trip across the wasteland wasn't too much different from Ellie's, fighting infected, as well as the remnants of humanity. But the military had taught her the ways that humanity looked at itself, the way that some people struggled to survive. She was numb for a long time, almost a year, and it took alot to bring her out of the daze that she was in when Tommy and Joel first found her. She still had little reminders, the 303 tattoo on her forearm, from the area code of her fallen QZ. Her combat vest, an lightweight IOTV, the camo still stained with the blood of the many, many people that died as she crossed the wasteland. But if you looked at her right now, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Her smile was bright, she shook her head as Nick stood walked to the other side of the room, wrapping up a cigarette with the little bit of tobacco he had left.
"Hey mother fucker you better roll me one of those." She called over, Nick shook his head.
"Hell no, the price that Derek is askin' for this shit these days, you'd think it was fucking armageddon." He replied. Ellie laughed, shaking her head as she and Trent throw their days kill on the counter in the kitchen.
"You guys were out all that time and this is it?" Nick said, looking at the rabbits now strewn across the countertop.
"Don't see anything from you, so... Fuck You?" Ellie sneers.
"Ha, Dont flatter yourself." Nick says, lighting the cigarette, Freeze Frame.
Nick Van Martin
Nick showed up at the west gate of the settlement a couple of weeks after Ellie and Joel had found their way back. He was tired, hungry, and in the worse shape of anyone that had been taken in by the settlement. He was kept in quarantine for the first three days, for fear that some of the injuries he had on his body were infectious. This of course being before they had come across Zoey, and her CBI Detection Device. Nick had come from the Seattle QZ, and survived the war that had broke out there. Sometime in early 2034 the Firefly outpost in the area, had begun a campaign to overthrow the military inside the QZ, sending in moles to "Coerce" The population that the QZ would be better served under Firefly rule. It was a good ploy, banking on the fact that food was scarce, the people were hungry, and desperate. They used this to their advantage, and when the day finally came, the battle raged. And three days later, most of the inhabitants of the Seattle QZ were either dead or "Otherwise". Nick survived, and from the stories he had told, he might have been the only one.
His time in the settlement had done him well, put some of the weight back on him. He looked almost as healthy as Trent, the two having the same hair, dark, messy. His black tank top and skinny jeans almost filled. Ellie had seen him come a long way from who he was when he first rolled through the gates, he was angry, confused, and mislead. Whatever he had seen on his journey to Jackson, he put his head in a dark place, she could still tell he wasn't fixed. But were any of them? He was one of the only people in the settlement that still managed to find cigarettes or tobacco, the only other being the shopkeeper in Up-Town. He Started up the stairs heading for his room, the peice of wood above the door read, "Lionheart."
"Oh yeah, Trent, Hannah said she wanted to see you in the War-Room when you got back." He called down. Trent scoffed.
"Oh my god, please stop calling it that."
"Hey man its what she wants." Nick rolled his eyes.
"Hannah!" Trent yelled up the stairs, at the end of the hallway emerged another Dark Haired girl, a little taller than Ellie, but shorter than Trent and Nick. Her hair put in a pony tail, a tattered leather vest over a dirty tank top, a few dark colored necklaces hanging from her neck. Her pants were stained with dirt, her boots dropping bits of mud as she stepped over the hardwood floor. She leaned over the railing and shook her head at the two of them standing near the dining room table. Freeze Frame.
Hannah Warr
Hannah, perhaps the most chaotic Element of the House of Wolves. She had quite a different life from the rest of them, and sometimes Ellie didn't really know what Hannah was really doing in the settlement. When she was young, her parents had been Brutally murdered by Hunters, in the years after the outbreaks humanity was crumbling, people were especially crazy during that time. The hunters that did the deed, had kidnapped her, brought her up in their style of life. Giving her a certain outlook on the wasteland. Ellie had seen just how Brutal a killer Hannah could be, how tenacious she was when the time came. But for everything that she was, there was a side to Hannah that wanted to make connections with people like Ellie and the rest of the wolves. She shared her skills with them, having fought through some of the wasteland's worst cities. Highly skilled in Urban as well as Rural combat. She had found her way to the settlement, alone, they had found her stealing food, almost a year and a half ago. She was a fighter, one of the best Tommy and Joel had ever seen. They never really understood why it was she stayed, she had the skills and the drive to make it on her own. But maybe it was, she was just done fighting. Either way, Ellie found her to be trustworthy.
"Me and Zoey covered alot of ground today guys, found something I think you'll find interesting." She said, looking down at Trent, he rolled his eyes. placing his pack on the ground next to the couch. Zoey instantly noticed his new weaponry.
"Hell yeah, AEK-971, I haven't seen one of these in a long time, where'd you find it?" She said, picking it up and ejecting the shell from the chamber, catching it with her opposite hand, leaving the action open to inspect the inside.
"Ran into some Bandits, they... didn't need it." He replied with a smirk.
"Where'd you guys make it to?" Ellie asked, looking up at Hannah.
"We made a fifteen mile loop, took most of the day, but you guys said you ran into Bandits?" She stepped down the stairs, her head dancing back and forth between the two of them.
"Yeah, four of them." Ellie said, taking her backpack off and strapping it onto the back of the chair.
"Interesting, how far were you from here?" Hannah sat down at the table.
"A Few miles, these guys are getting close, we need to talk to Tommy."
"Right, can I ask that you not do that until after we get some things handled?" Hannah asked, looking up mischievously at Ellie. Who returned her look right back as she sat down at the table.
"What kind of things?"
"Things that could land us with a fuckload of new toys." Said a voice from the top of the stairs. Freeze Frame.
Andrew Harris
Andy, A medium height teenage kid, his ragged red hoody over a blue V-neck, skinny blue jeans and converse. He was living breathing proof, that the wasteland, as unforgiving as it was, also had a sense of humor. His parents had found their way into Jackson almost directly after the downfall of the Seattle QZ, they had been "Doomsday Preppers" before the outbreak. For much of Andrew's life he never knew what life was like on the other side of the wall, growing up almost sheltered other than the military program that his parents put him into. But as the walls fell, his parents fled Seattle, finding Jackson a few months later. In his time in the Settlement he has taken a strong liking towards maintaining weaponry, working down at the Armory most days of the week.
"Andy, check this shit out." Zoey says, tossing the weapon to Andy.
"Where'd you find this?" he played with the action momentarily.
"Around." Trent rolled his eyes.
"It looks like its been worn a bit." Zoey said, turning back to her video game.
"Yeah, you think you can do anything for me." Trent asked.
Andy took a couple of seconds to look over the model of the weapon, nodding his head. "Yeah, good thing about these, alot of the parts match up, I might just have to machine something down, shouldn't take too long."
"Right, well see what you can do."
"Trent, you wanna see what I'm talking about?" Hannah said, looking up at him from the table.
He sighed, running his hand through his hair. "Yeah, but I'm gonna run this shit over to the Cafe before it starts to turn."
Freeze Frame.
Trenton Marlowe
Trent, the only one of the group that had been living in the settlement longer than Ellie and Joel. Out of all the wolves, Ellie found him to be the most level headed, and if she had to finger someone as the group's "leader", it would have been him, as much as Hannah would have liked to believe otherwise. He came from a Quarantine Zone on Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. But as the Military power grew in the area, it became less and less stable. The military presence, as calming as it was supposed to be, was in fact the exact opposite. Trenton was one of the first to leave, making his escape with a small group of survivors, by the time they had crossed the country, and found their way to Jackson, Trenton... was the only person left. Whatever he had to do to make it in the wasteland, you could see only when he let you. Ellie could tell, but not too many others bothered to really look. She had always wondered what had happened to him, but had never had the guts to ask him, things like that we're sort of unspoken in the House of Wolves. It really didn't matter what your past was, just as long as you helped build a future.
Joel saw it in him too, the two spent a couple days a week, Trent being the only other person in Jackson who could actually match Joel's skill with a guitar. The two had become quite the pair when it came to music, and Ellie enjoyed listening to them, it made her happy to see Joel like that. Like nothing had ever happened, like the world hadn't ever ended.
As the door shut behind him, Hannah turned to Ellie, her fingers now tapping lightly on the table.
"You wanna come check this out anyway?"
Ellie was sort of spacey, looking blankly off into the table in front of her.
"Hey, you alright?" Hannah snapped her fingers.
"Oh... yeah, what?" Ellie said, shaking her head.
"You wanna come take a look at this?" Hannah said firmly.
"Yeah, I'll take a look at it." Hannah nodded, standing up from the table, Ellie following close behind.
As the two pass Ellie's room, the words "To The Edge of The Universe and Back" Written across the top of her door, she tosses her backpack onto her bed. The two step to the end of the hallway, the door marked "War Room". The inside of the room was covered in old Movie posters, World War Z, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, where she found all of these Ellie had no idea. But between her and Zoey, covering the ground that they did, it wasn't too weird for them to come across various and sundry items. The two stepped over to a small desk sitting against the wall on the far side of the room, Hannah flicking on the light just above.
Spread out on the table was a map, drawn on a piece of cloth, the center was Jackson, the outlying areas marked out, in the last couple of months Joel and Tommy had marked out a reservation for the settlement, sanctioning off Hunting Zones. Hannah had made different marks on the map, marking out landmarks, as well as game trails. But there is a new mark, a few miles outside of the reservation.
"There, its a farm." She says, tapping her finger against the map.
"You guys covered alot today." Ellie observed.
"Yeah, I guess, normally I wouldn't be coming to everyone with this but I the farm is being used as some sort of camp, a cache or something."
"For who?"
"Judging by the profile, Hunters, bandits, its mostly men, no kids, so its not like its some sort of settlement." she pulls a peice of paper from her pocket, laying it out across the top of the map. The paper is a drawing, an outline of the camp, a large field separating the buildings from the treeline, three large buildings, surrounding a central house.
"What is all this stuff?" Ellie asked.
"A Barn, stables of some sort, all around this house, we watched for a couple of hours, the way I see it, they are using the barn as the cache, weapons, food, they had a few people come and go, I think they are using it as a forward operating base of some sort."
"For what?"
"I dont know, but it didn't take us much to find them, so if I had to wager a guess it probably hasn't taken them shit to find us." Hannah tapped her finger tediously on the table.
"So what you thinkin'?"
"I'm thinking they are preparing for something, there aren't enough of them to try and take this place down, but with what I saw coming into that barn, they are stocking up for some reason."
"Stocking what?" Ellie asked.
"Alot of fun toys." Zoey's voice chimed in, leaning against the doorway.
"The way we see it, its an opportunity, for us, as well as Jackson, but we can't let Tommy know, you wanna tell me any more about those men you guys dealt with?" Hannah turned to Ellie.
"They were just... some chicken-shit bandits, nothing really note worthy." Ellie rubbed the back of her head, stepping over to the window.
"Did they say where they came from?" Zoey stepped up behind her as she rubbed her hands together.
"Trent really didn't ask, they said they needed food, but... nothing else that I can remember."
"You think their the same group?" Zoey turned to Hannah, her eyes looking over the map.
"I dont know, how far were you from Jackson?"
"I dont know... a few miles?" Ellie said timidly.
"Damn their fucking cuttin' it close, we have to move, ASAP." Hannah said, turning to the two of them.
"If we do this Ellie, we need to know that your with us." Zoey's eyes looking Ellie over, the three stood in silence for a few moments. Ellie's thought process going over all the possible scenarios this could play out.
"So... what you proposing is... walking in there... and just... taking what they have?" Ellie shook her head, sitting down in the chair, her eyes glued to the floor.
"Ellie, these guys could be staging up for something big, if they bring the fight here, it could be what really sets this place off." Hannah said.
"People are talking, yeah, its comfortable here, but I really feel like if it comes down like that, people might try and find a new place to live, I dont want to see this place lose because we stood here and did nothing." Zoey added.
"So we tell Tommy, and Joel, they'll rally up the people to-"
"Ellie, this is ours, besides you know how it would go if they found out we actually went off the reservation." Hannah interrupted Ellie, looking down at the girl with the dark brown pony tail. Ellie sat for a few moments, considering the options.
"What about Trent?"
"Fuck Trent, he'll think we're crazy."
"But we need them, Andy and Nick too if we're going to make this work." Zoey said with a grin.
There were a few more moments of silence between the girls.
"Can we count on you to have our back on this?" Hannah's eyes met Ellie's, she could tell that she was really asking her for this favor. Ellie took a couple of deep breathes, letting her head fall backwards, letting out a sigh and rubbing her eyes. She shook her head, and slowly rose from the chair.
"When do we go?