Sorry for the super short chapter but I wanted to finally upload something. School is demanding most of my time, so I didn't get much time to write. Enjoy and comment!
"Through this door," Ethan opens it slowly. It creaks loudly, as though waking from its sleep. He suddenly stops with the door barely open.
"What's the matter?" I ask him. He remains frozen.
"No, no, no, no," Joel bursts the door open. The room is baren, littered only with trash and plastic wrappers. Joel desperetely looks around for anything, but the room is completely empty. Only a lone window opposite the wall with the door reveals some sunlight and clickers walking around aimlessly in the snow.
Joel suddenly pulls his pistol from its holster and points it at Ethan. Ethan immedietely raises his arms.
"What are you—" Ethan doesn't finish his sentence.
"Give me one goddamm reason I shouldn't put a bullet in your head!"
"Wait, Joel, hold on!" I try to calm him down. He ignores me.
Ethan desperately tries to think of something so say. He glances over at me, just before he moves his left hand, the one Joel can't see, slowly behind his back. He's going for a gun. I start to move my hand for mine when— I feel an excruciating pain in my right leg, which was closest to the window. Glass shatters and the loud wind blows snow inside, masking my cry of pain. A burning sensation grows worse in my thigh. Like lighting a match on the inside of my leg with a perpetual, white flame. A gunshot. I have always wondered what it felt like; now I know. From the wound down, my right leg has no feeling. It hurts, so much.
"Ellie!" Joel yells. I fall to the ground, on the brink of tears. The horrible screeches of clickers get louder. They're coming, fast.
Joel effortlessly picks me up and carries me out the room. There isn't any time to put on gas masks so he jumps out of a window in the opposite direction of the spores. With all of the bouncing around, my leg constantly hits against his arm causing me to go near the edge of blacking out from the sheer intensity of the pain. I clench onto his jacket, trying to overcome it. I bury my face in his chest and scream, but that doesn't help it. Once outside in the snow, I hear more gunshots from behind us.
"You had a gun?!" I hear Joel ask Ethan.
"Sorry," he replies. Ethan empties his clip onto the creatures behind us. We go back onto the snow-covered highway. We run, and run, and run until the sounds of the clickers screaming behind us fades, but the pain is just too much. I pass out in Joel's arms.
I hear his voice, "Ellie! Ellie, no! Sara—"
It's cold. I'm wearing Joel's jacket, I recognize the smell. The gunshot wound in my leg is mostly numb with some stinging, but not much, reminding me of the events from before. I can see that I'm in the back seat of an old bus. The cushion on each seat has either rotted away or have been stolen, leaving only the freezing metal. Most of the windows are still in tact, providing some shelter from the cold outside.
I lean up against the back of he bus and look at my watch, 11:33 AM. I've been out for four hours?!
I move to a sitting position and take a deep breath as I slowly push myself onto my feet. At first I stumble a little so I use the chair to keep myself upright. In the seat in front of the one I was laying on, to the left, I see Joel's backpack. I open it and see his spare gas mask. I look at it closer and see a crack on the right eye glass. It's broken. Judging by the way it looks, it's been broken for a while. My mask is in my backpack, even though I don't even need it, and that isn't the mask that Joel uses. Which means— oh God. Ethan.
Joel catches me off guard and I jump, "Hey," He gets up from laying down in the seat in front of mine, "How're you feelin'?"
From how he looks I can tell that he just woke up. "I think my leg is okay. The wound still hurts like a bitch though." I try to stay calm, as to not to alert him of anything. If Joel were to find out about Ethan, he would kill him for sure.
"Can you walk?"
I try to move forward on my own, but stumble down. "Easy," Joel says helping me stand. I try again and manage to move a few steps on my own.
"I can walk, but not much anything else." I look around the bus, "Where's Ethan?"
Joel leans over the chair to take a water bottle out of his open backpack. His expression changes. "He helped me with your leg, then he left."
"He just left?" I didn't even get to say goodbye.
"Yeah." Joel stares at the ground while gripping he tops of the chairs on either side of him. I honestly would not expect this type of reaction from him. He looks up at me with a determined look on his face, "Come on." He turns around and starts toward the exit.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"Find out who shot you."