Chapter 21: Move On

The hokey country music was still playing in the truck as we began shooting the men that were coming at us. Joel loaded his gun immediately, and aimed it in their general direction.

"I'm gonna go ahead to buy you a few minutes," he said to me as I wiped the tears from my eyes while trying to reload my gun. "Take your time, okay?"

I looked at his face, and on it was a look of genuine concern for me that I hadn't seen before in all the years I'd known him. He'd always looked out for me, but he'd never told me to take a minute to gather myself or anything remotely close to it. He would normally just give me a few brief moments before we had to get moving again. I wasn't sure what changed in him in the last few minutes, but I smiled and nodded all the same.

He went on ahead, and I tried to reload my gun as fast as I could. It was hard, though, since my hands were shaking from what just happened. I shook them up and down to try and get them to stop, but it was no use. At least my breathing was normal.

"Here," Ellie said, noticing me struggling, and taking my gun from me to reload it herself.

"Thanks," I said as she finished, taking the gun back and letting out a deep breath to calm myself down.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Ellie asked, giving me the same amount of concern as Joel had, only with her, it was slightly different. I couldn't figure out how, though.

"Yeah," I answered. "Just shaken up, that's all." Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, but at the same time, I didn't expect to have this kind of reaction to it. It wasn't like I was almost killed; in fact, I've been through that numerous times in my life. That couldn't have been any worse. However, I had to admit that I'd never been more scared in my life. Not of dying, or guns, or the infection. Somehow, that man leaning over me was the worst fear I'd ever experienced.

"I'm here for you, you know," Ellie said.

I smiled down at her, and stroked her jaw line with my free hand. "I know," I said. "I appreciate that, but I'm really okay. You cry about it, and you move on."

Ellie nodded, knowing I was right. I'd never been glad for the fast pace of this world before, but in that moment, I was. I didn't want to dwell on what happened. I just wanted to forget. I then allowed myself to follow Joel out into the street, keeping close by him so that we could move more quickly together. Although I was still a little shaky, I quickly found a way to release the tension bubbling up in me. Most of the men looked like my attacker, and shooting them down was one of the greatest feeling I'd ever felt. It was easy for me to imagine that they were all him, and by shooting them, I was able to feel better with every bullet. My only came when all the men were dead.

"That all of them?" I asked, a frown crossing over my face.

"Take it easy, Kara," Joel said, walking over to where I was. "You shot a whole bunch of 'em."

"More than usual, I'd say," Ellie added.

"Well, it was therapeutic," I said, reloading the revolver.

Joel just laughed, "I'll never understand how you bounce back as quick as you do."

"I'm Tess's niece," I said, shocking both of them as I spoke her name. "That means I'm a survivor. Plain and simple."

Joel seemed to take in what I said, and nodded in agreement, "let's move along."

We then began to see Pittsburgh for what it was. In truth, it was far more depressing than Boston because of the sheer fact that it was deserted. Everything seemed so dark and foreboding. Graffiti lined the stone, and there was more rust than anything. We walked quickly and quietly down streets and through buildings until we eventually came to a closed garage door to a building that seemed pretty promising. Joel began to lift on the door, but he was only able to hold it about three feet off the ground. I came to his side and started to hold it with him, while Ellie crawled underneath the door to see if she could find anything inside to use to keep the door propped up.

"Umm," we heard her say when she crawled under the door. "There's some pretty gnarly stuff in here…"

"Ellie!" Joel called to her to make her keep looking. I didn't know about him, but the weight of the door was beginning to cut into my hands.

I heard the sound of Ellie finding the chain that lifted and lowered the door. She tugged on it until she herself was holding the door up instead of Joel and me.

"Come on," she instructed, and we quickly crawled under the door, helping her lower the door behind us as gently as humanly possible. We didn't want to alert anyone else who may be around.

"Look," Ellie said, turning the opposite direction of the door. There was a table in front of us, with one light bulb shining down on it. On the table was a body, thinning and boned with decay. All around the room were piles of clothes that'd all belonged to different people at one point or another. Ellie was right; things were pretty gnarly in here, but I'd seen worse. It was almost sad really; how desensitized I was.

"Fucking hunters," Joel said to himself. "See, this could've been us."

"Man," Ellie said, taking it all in. "That's a lot of people that didn't make it."

I looked at Ellie to see her eyes widened out, and looking at everything in awe. I didn't know if she was scared or not, but I put my arm around her, rubbing her shoulder, just in case.

"Hey," I said as she gave me a small smile. "This will never be us, okay? We're gonna protect each other, the three of us." I knew I'd protect her with everything I had, and when it came down to it, I knew that Joel would too.

"You gonna take care of me?" Ellie asked, mimicking what I said back when we first got the truck in Bill's Town. I smiled, pressing my forehead to the side of her head, "you bet."

"I knew I should've turned the damn truck around," Joel said, picking up supplies around the room.

"We lived," Ellie pointed out.

"Barely," he specified.

"Always optimistic, Joel," I said.

"I'm being honest. Come on, you two. Let's just get out of here."

We went out of the room, and into an area with a flight of stairs. I couldn't make out even what this building may have been used for. It was completely grey and metal and depressing. I just wanted out of there all together.

"How did you know?" Ellie asked Joel as we went up the stairs.

"Know what?" he asked.

"About the ambush." I wanted to know the answer to this too, but I hadn't thought to ask him.

"I've been on both sides," he answered, which didn't surprise me. I didn't know much about Joel's life before Boston. He told me what he wanted to, and I didn't want to probe him about it. It seemed to bring up bad memories for him, so for the most part, I just left it alone. I lived for bits and pieces of his life like that, being as I was incredibly curious despite not wanting to push any buttons.

Ellie didn't seem to share my views, "so, you kill a lot of innocent people?"

Instead of responding to her, he just grunted.

"I'll take that as a yes."

"Take it however you want."

"Is he always this talkative?" Ellie asked me sarcastically.

"He doesn't like to talk about his life," I said. "And honestly, I don't like to ask. I think it makes him sad."

"Oh," Ellie said, looking down at the floor as we walked. I don't think she thought of it like that before.

As we walked, it became very clear that this was where the ambushers slept. There were dirty mattresses in many of the rooms with measly blankets and empty food cans. I didn't know how anyone could stand to live the way they did, but the survival instinct really fucked with some people; it made people do shit they wouldn't normally do. Outside the building, that was most apparent when we saw piles of scorched bodies like we had back at Bill's, only these piles were different.

"I don't think these guys were infected," Ellie said, looking at them.

"I think you're right," I said.

"It don't matter. Let's just keep moving," Joel said. I couldn't tell if he really wanted us to get out of there quickly, or he just didn't want us looking at the piles. Maybe a little of both.

"See that bridge?" he asked us, pointing to a yellow arch in the distance. "That's our way out of here."

"Great," I said as Ellie and I started to walk ahead of him.

"Hey, guys. Wait for me," he called out, rushing up to us.

"What, we're right here," Ellie said.

"How about you let me go first, and keep your voices down." His voice sounded very much like an angry parent. It was kind of funny under the circumstances.

"Okay," Ellie said in a lower voice that she made sound like that of man. It made me laugh, but Joel didn't seem too amused.

We were on the outskirts of the city now, and we even found the entrance to the quarantine zone, or at least what was left of it. There was a checkpoint, but it didn't look like anyone had been here for a long time.

"It's strange seeing a checkpoint with no soldiers," I said.

"This is what most zones look like," Joel informed us. "This place has been abandoned for a long time."

Ellie and I walked over to one of the walls, where a graffiti message said 'stop feeding us lies. Give us our rations.'

"Why wouldn't they give them their food?" Ellie asked after she'd read it.

"Sometimes they ran out. Most of the time, they just held on to it."

"That never happened in Boston."

"Trust me, it happened all the time," I answered before Joel could. "We went hungry plenty of times. Well, I didn't as much as Joel and Tess. They gave me their food a lot of times." I thought back to those nights when all the rations were gone, and I was the only one who had food in my stomach. Many times, they were so hungry that they couldn't sleep. I would sometimes feel really guilty about it, but Tess would always tell me not to; that it was their choice what they did with their food, and they were choosing to give it to me.

"You really gave her your food?" Ellie asked Joel, bringing me back to the present.

"Yeah," Joel said. "She needed it more than we did." I smiled despite myself. To them, I hadn't been a kid, really, but they still looked out for me.

We turned our backs on that abandoned checkpoint and didn't look back. We then went through a series of buildings and alleyways, all the while getting closer to the bridge. I began to notice that Ellie and I were sticking closer to Joel than we had before. I didn't know if it meant anything, but it certainly felt like we were getting places faster now that were closer together. Soon, we made it to an area that was probably a street once, but was now a large pond. The hunters had made a makeshift bridge out of two buses in the middle of the pond, one end going into a coffee shop, the other going into a hotel. The two buses weren't quite long enough to touch, so there was a long plank between them. When we approached the area, there were two hunters standing on it.

"Hey, get down," Joel said, moving us behind an old car to wait until they left.

"Hurry up with that plank," one of them called out while the other one pulled up the plank so that it wasn't connecting the two sides anymore. They then walked into the hotel.

"Goddammit," I said when they were out of sight. "Gotta fix the bridge."

"We're like Bob the Builder in this bitch," Ellie said.

"Bob the who?" I asked, never having heard of that.

Ellie just laughed, "it's a TV show. They played episodes for the little kids in school."

"Lucky sons of bitches," I said, feeling jealous. I couldn't remember ever laying eyes on a TV show.

"Well, there's the bridge," Joel said, looking out into the distance. It was fairly close now. We started walking through the water until it got to the point where it was too deep. Joel and I began to swim, but Ellie stayed back, finding the top of a car to stand on.

"I can't make that jump," Joel said as the two of us swam over to the gap between the two buses.

"If you can get me up there, I can move that plank," Ellie called after us.

Once inside the gap, we could see that one of the buses was open, and it lead up to the coffee shop.

"You find a way to get her up to the plank," Joel said to me. "I'll see where this goes."

"Okay," I said, swimming to the other side of the bridge while Joel went up into the bus. On this side of the bridge, there was a wooden palette, and it seemed sturdy enough for her to stand on. I grabbed hold of it, and swam it over to Ellie, who gently stepped on it. Thankfully, it held her weight.

"How come you know how to swim?" Ellie asked me as I swam her over to the bridge.

"Someone taught me," I said. "I could swim before I could walk; or at least, that's what they tell me."

"I wish I knew how," Ellie said, climbing up to the top of the bus.

"Maybe I'll teach you one day," I said.

"I'd like that." She held her hand down to me, and I took hold of it. She hoisted me up onto the bus with more strength than I thought she had.

"Thanks," I said, ringing out my hair.

"No problem." She'd said it absent-mindedly, as she seemed very interested in me ringing out my hair. When I was finished, I said, "what?"

"Nothing," she said. "Your hair's just…I don't know, really pretty."

"My hair, huh?" I asked as I plopped the plank down to that it joined the two sides of the bridge again.

"Yep," Ellie said.

"Anything else?" I hadn't meant it in flirting way. I thought she'd say something like the blood stains on my shirt, or the way the dirt that caked my face looked in the moonlight, or some bullshit like that. However, that's not what I got.

Ellie just walked over to me, standing next to that plank, said, "yep" again, and walked over the plank to the coffee shop where Joel was. I was taken aback. Did she just flirt with me? I dared not ask to be on the safe side.

I followed her into the coffee shop, which was all mainly covered in water and old bottles. The smell of it almost made my eyes water.

"God, this place stinks!" Ellie called out.

"Yeah, wood's all rotted," Joel said, appearing out from behind a counter.

"Did you go to coffee shops a lot?" Ellie asked.

"I did. All the time."

"What would you get?" I chimed in.

"Just coffee."

"That's boring," I said to just Ellie as the three of us walked back to the bridge and towards the hotel. "I'd get one of them fancy schmancy drinks, and drink with a look that screamed 'I'm better than all of you peasants."

Ellie laughed, "I'd be right there with you, doing the exact same thing."

"Total BFF's," I said, using a valley girl accent. She just laughed some more.

As we approached, she asked Joel, "you think those hunters are gone?"

"We're about to find out," he answered.