Author's note on her being unsure about how roads work:
Bear with me.
"Alright. Whatever supplies you may want or need, I suggest you grab them."
"Thanks Bill. Ellie, take a look around, see what we can use."
"Alrighty."
Ellie wandered around cheerfully, and was more keen on playing around with a chess set she saw on a diner table, but did end up picking up a rag or two. Once she'd grabbed some blades, binding, ammo, a training manual and a pipe, Tess made her way over to Bill.
"Found everything you need?" He asked, opening the door for them and walking ahead.
"We're good." Tess nodded, following him. She closed the door behind Ellie at Bill's request.
"We have to cross to the other building, up the stairs. Let's move it."
"Psh."
"Ellie." Tess sighed irritably. Along the way, Bill had started talking to himself.
"You weren't kidding about him." Ellie half-whispered.
"Yeah, he's one of a kind." Tess responded just as Bill was done telling himself off.
"So, what kind of trouble are you in?" He asked. "Where the hell's Joel?"
"It's just a job. A simple drop off."
"What are you delivering? That little brat?"
"Haha. Fuck you too." Ellie retorted. Bill laughed.
"Y'know, I hope you know what you're doin'."
"Are you kidding me with this guy?" Those two certainly weren't going to be friends any time soon.
"Where are we going, Bill?" Tess carried on, trying to stop the insults.
"My other safe-house. It's more of an armoury."
"Wait, I thought we were gonna fix up a car." Ellie cut in.
"We? You know how to fix up a-"
"Bill. Just..." Tess refrained from yelling at them both.
"It's like I said, what I need is on the other side of town. Now, that side I don't ever go to because it's filled with infected. So we're gonna need guns."
At the bottom of the stairs, she heard the noise of infected, and didn't hesitate to brandish her gun.
"Shhh. There's infected inside."
"Oh. I've been meaning to take care of that for a while. Relax, it's nothin'."
Ellie was about to question him saying "relax" when talking about infected, until she saw the runner trapped in a boarded up window.
"So, you didn't answer my question about Joel. I mean, I thought the two of you were inseparable." Bill enquired.
"He didn't want to come." Tess answered curtly. It wasn't a lie.
"Yeah, sure..." He swung his Kukri down into the runner's neck, taking two swings to cut through. He kept talking the whole time. "Sounds to- ...me... Like there might be trouble in paradise."
"Yeah, something like that." Ellie noticed the melancholy tone in Tess' answer, and felt an urge to say something to make her feel better, even if it was just a simple apology, but remembered rule number one.
"Alright... Here we go." Bill said, opening the door wide for them.
"So, why don't you just fix up one of these cars?" Ellie asked once they were outside, gesturing to the many broken down vehicles around them. Of course, this only got her sarcasm from Bill.
"Oh my God, you're a genius." He began. "I mean, the whole time, why hadn't I thought about fixin' one of these cars?" Tess pinched the bridge of her noise.
"Okay... Don't be a dick."
"Their tires are rotted and their batteries are dead."
"Are you done?"
"Can't even begin to think what the inside of the engine blocks look like. Only ones making new car batteries are the military."
Having a discussion about cars - perfect time to be ambushed by a horde of infected. Much to her dismay, Tess ended up being the most injured due to it taking too long for her to reload her rifle after every shot - she made a mental note to upgrade it with whatever parts she could find the next chance she got - and the attack's very existence resulted in Bill scolding himself again.
"Okay, well now he's talking to himself." Ellie stated.
"Yeah... Bill?" Tess called him.
"Tess? This way." He replied, opening a gate, locking it behind them and walking up the stairs in front of them. "And up we go."
"You picked a hell of a place to hole up, didn't you?" Tess remarked in reference to the infected horde.
"You know, as bad as those things are, at least they're predictable. It's the normal people that scare me. You of all people should understand that."
"What does that mean?" Ellie asked.
"Nothing."
"Well, here we are. You. Don't touch anything. And you close the door." Bill instructed as they walked down the steps of the cellar that was his safe-house. He lit an oil lamp to give them light. "Let's gear up." Ellie moved towards the guns, only to be stopped by Tess.
"No."
"What? I need a-"
"I said no."
"Tess, come on. I can handle myself."
"No." Tess patted her shoulder as if to hold her in place before moving on. "Just stay here, alright?"
"Fine." Ellie grumbled, stepping towards some shelves to find something to do. "I'll just wait around for you two to get me killed."
"Well, this goes on record as the worst fuckin' job you've ever taken." Bill commented.
"That's a little harsh." Tess said, leaning on the defensive side for Ellie.
"How the hell is Joel okay with this suicide mission?"
"Actually, he advised against it."
"Really? And you didn't listen to him? Well, I guess you're not as smart as I thought you were."
"Mhm."
"Seriously, you gotta take that kid back to where you found her."
"Bill, I can't just take her back."
"Then send her packing, let her find her own way. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, I had somebody that I cared about." He stopped. "It was a... partner. Somebody I had to look after. And in this world, that sort of shit's good for one thing. Gettin' ya killed. So you know what I did? I wisened the fuck up. And I realised it's gotta be just me."
"Bill, you don't understand... It isn't like that-"
"Bullshit. It is just like that. Hey!" He shouted at Ellie, who was fiddling with a stack of magazines and comics. "What'd I say to you when we walked down the steps? What'd I say?"
"I'm just fixing your stupid pile."
"Don't touch."
With little patience left, but nothing left to say, all Ellie did was flip him off.
"Goddammit. You keep babysitting long enough and eventually it's gonna blow up in your face."
"Bill." Tess groaned. "Can we please just get on with it?"
"Fine." Bill threw her one of the shotguns he had been preparing while telling his story. "Let's get on with it."
And get on with it, they did. Bill showed Tess how to make nail bombs, which turned out to be particularly useful against the Clickers - or most kinds of infected, actually - they encountered on their way to find the battery for Bill's car. It turned out it wasn't where it was supposed to be, and had been put inside a different car by Bill's deceased partner, Frank, in another building, that just needed a little push to help it get going. This wasn't an easy task either, due to the pesky infected that kept running at Tess and Bill while Ellie had the luxury of being in the driver's seat. Not that she didn't need protection from them at all. Tess drove off with Ellie, leaving Bill to continue living in solitude, and in retrospect, the whole thing was just another day of surviving. Ellie, someone relatively new to the experience, was overwhelmed with relief when she got to just sit back in the truck and read.
"Oh, man." Ellie's sudden complaining made Tess jump slightly, pulling her out of her thoughts and preventing her from dozing off. She glared at her in the rear view mirror.
"Hey. Go back to sleep." Ellie ignored her, continuing to talk about her comic.
"Okay. I know it doesn't look like it, but this here is not a bad read. Only one problem." She flipped it to the last page. "Right there. 'To be continued!' I hate cliffhangers..." Tess raised her eyebrows.
"You steal that from Bill?"
"Uh... No."
"Uh-huh."
"Okay, maybe I did. But, I mean, all this stuff was just lying there."
Tess held back a smile. "What else did you get?" Ellie grinned, reaching into her backpack.
"Well..." She pulled out an old tape. "This make you all nostalgic?" Tess took it, and scoffed when she saw the title.
"Nope." She held it out for Ellie to take, only to have it pushed back.
"Come on, play it!"
"Alright..."
Once she heard it, though, Ellie's face was a little less excited.
"Well, better than nothing." She reached back in her bag to take out a magazine. "Oh. I'm sure 'your friend' will be missing this tonight."
"Mhm." Tess replied, oblivious of and uninterested in what she was talking about.
"Light on the reading, but it's got some interesting photos."
Oh.
"Uh, Ellie, that's not for kids..."
"Woah!" Ellie exclaimed at a poster she found in it. "How the hell would you even walk around with that thing?" Tess reached back, trying to taking it away from her.
"Give me that, just-"
"Hold your horses, I wanna see what all the fuss is about." On the next page, she looked confused. "Oh. Why are these all stuck together?"
"Um..."
She started laughing.
"I'm just fucking with you." She closed the magazine, opened the window and threw it away. "Bye-bye, dude!" She climbed into the front passenger seat. "You know what? This isn't that bad." She said, turning up the volume.
"Sure." Tess chuckled. "Why don't you try to get some sleep?"
"Pfh - I'm not even tired."
By the time they got to Pittsburgh, Ellie had been asleep for a while, and was just waking up. As luck would have it, the highway was blocked with cars, trucks, etc.
"Well, shit." Tess mumbled, pondering on what to do.
"Now what?" Ellie yawned. It took a bit, but eventually, Tess deduced that they weren't going back and they weren't going down.
"We're walking."
"What? Are you sure?"
"Yeah. Out." She opened the car door for Ellie after getting out herself, and pointed ahead at a bridge far off in the distance. "You see that bridge over there? That's where we're goin'." Ellie nodded.
"So, are we going down, or..."
"Straight ahead. Climbing over cars should be no big deal."
"Wait, we're just leaving the truck here?" Tess looked back at it and sighed.
"As much of a waste it is, we have to. Listen, Ellie..." She started walking, motioning for Ellie to follow. "There are these, uh, pretty big groups of people who live in abandoned quarantine zones like the one in this city, and kill anyone they see to take all their stuff. They're called hunters."
"Oh."
"While going this way is probably just as dangerous, the roadblock is obviously to direct us down there into an ambush."
"Right." Ellie said. She hopped down off of a second car, and shimmied through a branch-filled gap between another two after Tess. "Ouch… um, so… Agh."
"What is it?" Tess seemed unaffected by the pricking twigs.
"So, you talked like you knew there were hunters around here, and how the whole ambush thing was gonna play out. Have you been here before, or something?"
"Ah, yeah… something like that."
"Okay…" Ellie could easily guess there was something she wasn't being told from the words "something like that", but chose not to ask about it anymore. If Tess was saying the same thing she told Bill when being asked about Joel, it was probably a touchy subject. "Pfh… I think it's time to lighten the mood." She pulled a thin book from one of her backpack's pockets. "Why was the Jack-o-lantern having an existential crisis?"
"You did not ride a horse."
"Hey, I'm serious! Riley told her friend Winston to teach me if she brought him some whiskey."
"Sure, sure..." Tess smiled sarcastically, and continued to listen to Ellie's stories of her life in the zone while they savoured their canned food. It had been a long day of walking, climbing over cars, and getting scratched by branches while listening to jokes the whole time. They eventually made it to a small, empty neighbourhood by sundown, and decided to stay the night in one of the houses, settling down in an upstairs bedroom. Surprisingly for Tess, they didn't run into any hunters on their way. And while they had a time to relax and talk, she kept her ears wide open for any suspicious noise, knowing that they couldn't be entirely safe. There were hunters in this city. She was sure of it.
"What was your life like, then?" Ellie asked with a mouthful of peaches. "Y'know, before the world went to shit?"
"I used to live in a place like this. Grew up with my dad, and I had two brothers. They got into a lot of fights, so the house was almost always noisy. I was a pretty shy kid, but, by the time I was about your age, I got sick of it, and ended up good at telling people to shut up and do what I say. I used to hate them, but... I guess their constant shouting changed me for the better."
"So, when the infection hit... did your whole family come with you to the quarantine zone?"
"Okay."
"Too much...?"
"Too much."
"Alright... sorry."
"That's okay." Tess handed her the remains of her own food and stood up, picked up her rifle and bow, and sat over on a bed next to the window. "Eat up." She said. "When you're done, get some sleep. I'll keep watch." Ellie quickly finished up her dinner and wrapped herself up in the duvet she'd taken from the bed. She laid down on her side, but spoke before closing her eyes.
"Um, Tess... I know I already said it before, but thanks. For everything. I'm really glad Marlene picked you."
Tess smiled. "You're welcome."