ELLIE.
"Dina!" Ellie says, grabs Dina's arm, pulls her away from the massive split forming in the floor near Dina's feet; but the ground continues to vibrate, continues to shake violently, and the split rips through the tile under them.
There's a sound like a car crash, an impossible, deafening rush of crunching, creaking, cracking-and then the floor heaves up underneath them, as if shoved by a massive hand, and Dina grabs hold of Ellie's arm-
"Ellie-!"
"The door-out the door-" Ellie pulls her toward the door of the stairwell, throws it open-
Only to find that the floor outside is already gone, already missing in huge chunks, revealing the contents of the basement in fractured glimpses.
Ellie's never worried herself with ideas about heaven or hell. The world in its current state has never allowed a lot of room for ideological binaries like that.
And, yet, Ellie was pretty sure she was looking straight into the gaping maw of hell itself.
Deep below, in the dark cavern of the basement, there's a floor-and yet it's not a floor at all. It's a writhing carpet of fungi, a tangled mass of lurching, clawing infected, tangled in vines and spores and moss, locked together by the bursting plates of bone and tissue on their own bodies. It seems to breathe, all at once, this web of bodies, this thing that is simultaneously many and yet one.
There's a cacophony of screams, strangled screeching and agonized wails, and a stench like fetid fauna, like rotting wood, decaying flesh. This web of fungi and infection spreads up the walls, over every surface, drips from the ceiling of the basement like stalactites, stalactites with the writhing arms of infected still reaching desperately out for something, anything.
"What the fuck is that, Ellie?!" Dina yells over the din of the tangled screams below.
"Jesus fucking Christ, I have no idea-we have to get out of here-this whole place is fucking falling down-"
Behind them, a fissure rockets up the side of the concrete staircase, and the whole thing begins to lean.
A few inches either way now and they're tumbling straight into that pulsing, groaning mass of infected below.
Ellie holds tight onto Dina, hard enough to bruise her arm, but she isn't letting go now, not for anything.
"ELLIE-"
It's Tommy, sweet, blessed, wonderful Tommy, running down the hall, skidding to a stop just on the other side of the fractured floor outside the stairwell.
"You gotta jump-" Tommy calls, "C'mon, I've got you-"
Ellie grips Dina's arm even harder for one more fraction of a second.
"Go!" She says as the floor trembles, "There are spores coming up from down there, you've gotta go now."
"I'm not leaving you, you idiot!" Dina says.
"You have to! I'm fine, I'll be right behind you, I fucking swear!"
"No!" Dina says, "I can't-please don't, Ellie-"
"Dina," Ellie leans in, holds her by the shoulders; puts her forehead against Dina's, "I'm right behind you, babe. I am. Please."
"Y'all better fucking do something -" Tommy calls at them, leaned low over the fractured edge of the floor, waiting.
Dina pulls away all at once, as if one more moment of hesitation will drain her resolve. She jumps, catches the edge of the other side, feet scrambling against empty air and for a second Ellie's heart holds still. But then Tommy grabs her, pulls her up and over and out of danger.
And then it's just Ellie's turn.
A chunk of concrete falls away under her foot unexpectedly and she jumps away, finds that she's quickly running out of room. Fuck. All she has to do is jump. That's all.
She steels her nerves, makes the jump.
At the last moment, more concrete gives out under her and she loses her footing, can't follow all the way through on the jump, isn't going to make it; her hands reach but the edge is too far away, too far off.
fuck fuck fuck
And then Tommy's hand clamps around her wrist; he's almost completely over the edge of the abyss, with Dina desperately anchoring his legs.
"Jesus shit, you're gonna give me a fuckin' heart attack, I swear to god, kid," He groans and starts to pull them both back up.
Dina grabs the back of his jacket, helps pull them both up to safety.
"We have to get out of here," Ellie gets out through heavy, gulping breaths of air, "We gotta go-"
"Nah, let's stay a fuckin' while-of course we gotta go, good god-" Tommy grumbles and pulls her to her feet.
"This way," Dina says, tugging Ellie's hand, "C'mon!"
"Hold on!" Ellie says, because it hits her, what she needs to do, what she has to do-what has to be done.
She reaches into her backpack, grabs the neck of a smooth glass bottle; it sloshes with gasoline as she draws it out. She scrambles in her pocket for the lighter- where the fuck is the lighter?
"Ellie," Tommy says warningly, "We don't fucking have time-"
"Hold on," She says, and she holds the lighter up to the tuft of rag sticking out of the bottle, strikes up a flame.
It goes up in an instant; she holds it over the screaming abyss below. Lets it go.
The screeching rises to a maddening crescendo.
...
Once they're outside again, the first breath of fresh air is as good and sweet as anything she can imagine. Clean and clear and full of sunlight.
Behind them, the smoke is rolling out of the building in great, billowing black clouds, oily and thick; there's an unholy chorus of screams, and Ellie isn't sure they're all infected.
But it doesn't matter.
She slams the doors of the lobby closed behind them, finds a long piece of warped rebar abandoned nearby and shoves it through the handles on the door. Nothing's getting out.
"Ellie, there were people still in there-" Dina says.
"Fuck 'em," Ellie says shortly, "It's the only way. The only way to stop them from coming after Evie and the baby. The only way to stop that…that fucking thing down there."
"Ellie-"
"Fuck 'em, Dina. Let's go get Evie."
...
"A motorcycle…?" Dina says with some mixture of surprise and dread and terror.
Ellie adjusts her backpack, tightens the straps, throws a leg over the seat of the beat up dirt bike.
"It's Jim's," She explains shortly, "I had to catch up to you guys somehow."
"Since when do you know how to ride a motorcycle, " Dina demands.
"Joel took me a couple of times," Ellie says quickly, "I know enough-" She takes hold of the handlebars, gives it a hard, swift kick and it revs to life, "Are you coming or what?"
Dina only hesitates for a second before she gets on behind Ellie.
"I'll take the truck," Tommy shouts over the engine, "Go east toward the river and see what you can find!"
Ellie nods, turns the handlebars east.