ELLIE.
"Dina…" Ellie murmurs as the world swam, sways, swells up around her, disorienting and strange and unreal, "DINA-"
Hands, pressing in on her, pushing her back against the bed; she tries to shove them off, but her arms feel hollow, burned up from the inside out.
"Ellie-" Someone is saying her name, but everything is still a heavy blur of color and sound; she can still feel the rolling blackness trying to pull her back under even now, "Ellie, you're safe-Jim, she's awake, come help me-"
" Getoffme," Ellie demands in a weak slur, trying to push past the shapes, trying to get up, because she knows somewhere deep down that Dina is gone, has left, and she doesn't know why or where but she knows she has to find her; she pulls at a tangle of wires and somewhere a machine lets off one long, high-pitched squeal of alarm, a one-note flatline, "GET OFF."
"Ellie."
And she can finally see that it's Carrie, the doctor; it's Carrie, pushing her back down into the bed. Jim, her assistant, is standing back, hands up, clearly not eager to try to make Ellie do anything she doesn't want to do.
She closes her eyes, hard, trying to keep herself from vomiting, because she doesn't have time for that. She just knows she doesn't have time for any of this.
"What the fuck, Carrie…" She says in a hoarse whisper.
"Yeah, what the fuck, Ellie? What happened?" Carrie says, and Ellie can feel her hands pressing in against her neck, checking vitals.
"I dunno…" Ellie says, and her hands won't stop shaking; her skin is damp with a cold sweat, "I dunno, I remember...the party...Dina. I remember dancing with Dina…"
She reaches up, covers her already closed eyes with a hand because everything is too bright, because she has to push back, past the boiling black clouds that had washed over her, the twisting, drowning memories and clawing pains of the past-she has to remember what happened.
"There was a woman…" Ellie says slowly, "Fuck. There was a woman-"
She sits up, more steady this time but still shaking.
"They injected me with something- motherfuckers," She chews on the word, because holy shit these assholes are going to get everything that's coming to them, they really are.
"What?"
"Yeah, stuck me with a fucking needle," Ellie says, and she lifts a hand to touch the spot.
Carrie leans forward, examines the area.
"Oh, shit. Shit. Do you know what it was?"
"I didn't have time to fucking ask, no," Ellie mutters and rips the monitors all the way off, throws her legs over the side of the bed, "How long have I fucking been here? Where's Dina? Evie? Did they attack us? Carrie-"
"Was it a sedative?" Carrie is murmuring to Jim, watching Ellie but clearly not really seeing her, lost in some thought, "Maybe she had an allergic reaction to their sedatives? No telling where they're even getting the stuff, how old it is…"
"I don't even care what it was," Ellie tells her, "Carrie- where the fuck is Dina?"
Carrie sighs.
"Ellie-you can't. You don't know what the effects of this are going to be in the long run, you could get halfway there and start seizing again, we don't know-"
"CARRIE," Ellie says, finally on her feet, swaying but still very much on her feet, " Where. Is. Dina."
...
DINA.
Dina stands up in the back of the truck, looks through the binoculars, down into the little bowl of a valley with the village nestled in the bottom, but there's almost nothing to see.
"Something ain't right," Tommy says, holding out a hand for a turn with the binoculars, "There were guys up on these gates before. We were getting sniped way back there. There were people moving around in there. Now there's fuckin' nothing. I don't like it, Dina."
"Less people to fight is never a bad thing," Dina says, "But where would they all go?"
"Well, I know that hospital has to be their base of operations. Ellie said she saw a lot of movement in there, lotta stuff going on."
"I mean, that only makes sense," Dina says, "Seeing as how that hospital is the creepiest goddamn building I've ever seen in my life-sure, of course that's the one we have to go into…"
"That's pretty much how it always shakes out, yeah…" Tommy sighs.
"If she was a veterinarian…" Dina says slowly, "Do you really think she even could make a cure, Tommy? That she really might know how to study this immunity stuff, figure it out?"
Tommy doesn't answer right away.
Finally, he shrugs, "I dunno. Maybe. But we've seen the shit they do. Like with these-pits in the ground, with the infected down in 'em? I ain't a scientist, but...that don't seem very fuckin' scientific to me…" He gives a small shake of his head, "Maybe she knows what she's doing, I dunno. But it seems more likely that she's just lost her goddamn mind."
...
"Tommy…" Dina says into the dark, "Tommy-there's nobody here."
She sweeps the beam of the flashlight slowly across the lobby; the light slides over a curved, old-fashioned desk, central command once for a staff of small town doctors and nurses and clerks, but now just empty.
Tommy tries a lightswitch, but nothing happens. Just an empty click, click, click.
"Let's keeping looking," He says behind her, "Gotta be somebody here somewhere who can point us in the right direction."
There's a long hallway, doors on each side; Dina shines her light down the corridor, and the beam gets swallowed up in darkness before it reaches the end. It doesn't feel good, doesn't feel like a particularly auspicious sign of things to come. There's a skin-crawling sense that someone was just here, that they've just missed out on something-but what?
Dina reaches the first door in the hallway, reaches out and pushes it open slowly, gun drawn. It opens with an unsettling ease.
"Tommy…" She says, "What the fuck is going on here…?"
The floor is covered in something slick and black, and there's a stench of old iron and something like moss, like mold. In the corner is what might be a body, but who the fuck could tell? It was a mangled shape that was only vaguely human in nature now; the legs were covered in gnarled, boney plates of fungi, and the head-the head was missing, with only shattered fragments of bone and tissue remaining, jutting up from the shoulders of the thing like macabre wall behind it was doused in a spray of bone and blood, gleaming wetly in the beam of Dina's flashlight.
But the torso. The torso was bound in tight stretches of dingy white linen, the arms forcibly wrapped tightly to the chest.
"They put a clicker in a straight jacket?" Dina breathes in confusion and growing unease, "The fuck?"
"Still fresh," Tommy says, "Something just happened here. We need-"
A scream cuts him short.
Dina draws the shotgun slung across her back and leans around the edge of the door, looking back out into the hall. There's a man scrambling in their direction, with a clicker snapping, scraping, swiping right at his heels.
He flashes past their door, wholly unaware of she and Tommy, and as the clicker gets within critical range she lowers the shotgun, steps out and fires. It's a deafening in the otherwise suffocating silence, a boom that reverberates in the bones; the lower half of the clicker separates from the rest of its bottom in a shower of wet tissue and calcified shards.
"Jesus-oh fuck-" The man, sporting a dirty lab coat, trips, falls into the floor in a heap, "Thank fucking god, oh shit, oh shit-"
Dina swings the shotgun around, levels it and the beam of her flashlight at him all at once; he holds both hands up in surrender, tries to wriggle away across the floor on his back, but the end of the shotgun doesn't leave him.
"Where's Redford?" Dina demands, "I know she's here-"
"She was!" The man stammers, "She was, but I don't know where she went-"
"Don't fucking lie to me-" Dina jams the shotgun closer.
"I swear!" He wails, "I swear, she had the girl, and everything was fine, but then-then-something got out of the basement-"
"The fuck does that mean?" Tommy asks.
"I-I-It's over, everything is fucked, containments breached-"
"I don't give a fuck about your containments -" Dina informs him, " Where is she?"
"L-listen," He quivers, "If she can get out, with the girl, there might still be hope, this might all have been for something-"
All Dina can think about is Ellie, rigid and seizing on the ground last night; all she can see is Evie, laughing as she lifts her new camera and snaps a picture of Ellie and Dina on the couch.
Dina turns away from him, walks past Tommy, back to where the wriggling head and shoulders of the clicker is still snapping and clawing at the floor. She grabs the thing by the back of the neck, drags the writhing mass of screaming rage and bones back to the man on the floor.
She pushes what's left of the clicker's face, that jumbled mess of plate and teeth, down onto him. He begins to scream, the pleading, soul-deep screams of pure terror and desperation. The arms are clawing at him, reaching blinding for whatever it can find, teeth snapping urgently and only missing his flushed, sweating cheek by a breath.
"Fucking tell me," Dina demands again through locked teeth, "Or I swear to god I will let this thing pull you apart."
"The river, " He shrieks, "She kept a boat on the river, just in case this exact thing happened and that's all I know-that's all I fucking know, I swear to god."
"So she's already out of the building?!" Tommy demands.
"YES," Lab Coat cries, shrinks away from the snapping teeth of the clicker, "YES, please-"
Dina pulls the clicker away, heaves it away; it lands with a wet flop of a sound and scrambles against the floor to turn itself around and rush back at her. She lowers the shotgun and fires, reducing it to unrecognizable bits of fleshy fungi and fragmented skull.
"C'mon, Tommy," She says, "We-"
A low, thunderous sound interrupts, reverberates off the walls of the hallway and sinks down inside them both; it makes every hair on the back of her neck stand up, makes the most primal part of her brain light up in terror.
"What the fuck was that?" Tommy whispers.
"Oh, fuck," The man on the floor says in a hushed, agonized voice, " It's the basement."
...
ELLIE.
Ellie is still panting, pulling every breath she can, by the time she reaches the lobby of the hospital in New Teton. Every step she's taken has been at a full sprint, every movement at break neck speed, just fighting to catch up, fighting to get here before something awful can happen.
But maybe she's too late.
She swings the flashlight around wildly-the desk, a dark hallway, a patterned floor-wait.
Blood there, across the tiles. Dark but wet. Scattered bits of a clicker, blasted in half by something-shotgun, probably. She keeps moving the flashlight, searching-
Dina's backpack. There in the floor. Contents spilled out, abandoned. Flashlight flickering weakly.
Fuck.
Fuck.
She moves down the hall, gun raised, flashlight searching, slicing through the darkness in that limited cone of illumination. All she can hear is her own breathing, quick and shallow and close, as she moves deeper into the depths of the building, listening for any sign of life, any sign of movement.
She still feels only half alive herself, still too cold and too hot all at once, but she can't stop. Not when Dina is out here. She has to be here somewhere. She has to.
With every corner rounded, she expects to find her, gutted and empty, sprawled in the floor-shot, stabbed, burned, broken. The possibilities just don't stop coming. When you've seen enough fucked up shit, you gain an uncanny ability to imagine even more fucked up shit-so she can't stop thinking it, seeing it, all the things that could have happened, all the ways she could find Dina's body.
She reaches the back of the building, and has found nothing; she tries to remember wear the stairs were at-finds the door to the stairwell in the beam of her light in the next instant. She goes to the door, tries to look in through the little window-can't see shit. She eases the door open-
And finds the black, cavernous mouth of a shotgun directly in her face.
"Ellie?" Dina says, " Ellie?"
"Jesus Christ, Dina-"
Dina throws her arms around Ellie and whispers a stream of words near her ear-sounds of relief and wonder and fear.
Ellie holds onto her as if her life depends on it, pulls away only to assess her for injuries, to make sure she's really okay.
Her lip is cut and bleeding, and she's sporting a fresh array of scrapes and bruises, but otherwise she seems whole.
"Are you okay?" Ellie asks, "Are you hurt? Bit?"
"No," She says, "No, I'm fine-are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Never better," Ellie says in a rush, "Where's Tommy?"
"We got rushed by some infected in the lobby," She says, "We got separated and I haven't been able to find him."
"And Evie?"
"The river," Dina says, "Redford kept some kind of last ditch escape boat at the river. We were about to go after her when we had to make a run for it. Ellie…" She grabs Ellie's arm, and there's a look of intense, focused alarm in her eyes, "Ellie, there's something here. Under the floor. Something-I don't know. Big."
"What's that mean?" Ellie asks.
"I...I don't know," Dina says, "I found Redford's office, and I found all these notes-and I think Tommy was right. I think she's out of her mind."
"Well, what did the notes say? We don't have a lot of time, Dina-"
"I don't know, the notes were-fucking weird but-I think she's been...trying to grow infected? Down in the basement."
"Grow...infected…? That doesn't make sense."
"It just talked about-routing moisture in, blocking the light out, trying to create... ideal environments- something fucked up is underneath us, Ellie-"
A long, low sound erupts from somewhere below, and Ellie swears she can almost feel the floor move. Feel it rise ever so slightly.
"What...the fuck…" She whispers, looking down at the tiled floor under her sneakers.
And then there's a sound like thunder, like the crack of a pistol right next to her ear, except it's coming from below, it's coming from right underneath-
And it's the sound of the floor splitting open under them.