Joel was bleeding out badly. Ellie and I had to act fast so we had no choice but to bunk down in the nearest building to shelter him in which was a mall. Luckily the door to a shop was open partly so we could get inside. "Enid, get it open! Hurry!" Ellie cried as we approached the door. "Okay!" I reply, sliding off of Callus.
I ran to the door in a foot of snow. The whole time my heart was racing in my chest; thumping against my ribcage like a drum. The panic I was feeling was making me feel numb in my body however, I couldn't let that take control.
It was a bit of a struggle but I managed to get it opened. Luckily, there was little sound coming from the door so nothing would hear us coming in. "Alright, it's open! C'mon!" I say, going inside. Ellie instantly comes inside and I shut the door behind us. There was a loud bang from the door.
Ellie climbs off of Callus, unhooks him, and leads him to the other side of the shop. "C'mon! We gotta find something to patch his wound! C'mon!" Ellie said, sounding like it was hard for her to breathe. I nod and I run over to a stray drawer.
I managed to control my shaking as I roughly pulled each drawer out. We had no luck; it was empty. "Shit! C'mon, give us something!" Ellie exclaims, looking through the drawers. "Fuck!" I scowl, becoming frustrated. After a minute of searching, Ellie finds something that we could use.
"Enid, I found duct tape!" Ellie said to me. I leave the drawer hanging open and run to Joel. He looked pale from the amount of blood he lost. We had to act fast. "Okay, we're gonna put you on your side." Ellie says, pushing him to his left side. He groaned tiredly from the movement.
I carefully pulled up his shirt and jacket so we could look at the wound. "Jesus…" Ellie said breathlessly. There was a hole in his abdomen. That pole had gone clean through him. It made my own stomach churn from how bad it actually was.
"What do we do?" I ask, looking at Ellie for a moment. "We gotta find stitches. There's gotta be some here in this mall." Ellie answers, pulling out her summer shirt from her back pack.
She carefully puts it over his wound, making it bleed through instantly. She puts the duct tape over the shirt to keep it in place. "Okay." Ellie sighs, covering him back up, "That should buy us some time." "Don't worry, we'll find you something to stitch you up." I say to him, having him lay on his back.
"Callus, keep an eye on him." Ellie tells the horse, taking me by the hand. I get up with her and go to the door that would lead us to the other part of the mall. I pull open the vertical door and let Ellie go under first. She holds the door open and looks back at Joel.
"We'll be back in a flash. Promise." she says, setting the door down gently. After it's set down, I put a padlock on the door so it would stay locked while we were away. "We totally got this." Ellie says, turning around to face what was behind us.
The mall we were in was covered in snow that had fallen through the broken ceiling. It was also fucking freezing in there. "Where the fuck do we go?" Ellie asks, looking around. I see an escalator in front of us that looked like it would lead us somewhere.
"Up there. Maybe there's something useful in another one of these stores." I say, pointing at the escalator. "Good call. C'mon." Ellie replies, jogging up to the escalator. I was one step behind her.
The two of us made it to the second story and it was another whole section of the mall. There were old carts sitting here and there, some snow had covered the old, musty, tiles. Some of the posters were so faded out that I couldn't make out what was written on them.
Then, there was the distinct, dreading sound of a clicker in the distance. "Ah shit." Ellie says quietly. "Fucking clicker." I scowled quietly. We jog to another corner where two more stores were present. One was Weston's Pharmacy, and the other was some sort of American Princess store, or some shit like that.
"Westons Pharmacy. Sounds promising, yeah?" Ellie asks me, having her eyes on the open medicine store. "Yeah. It sure does. Let's see what's inside." I say, jogging to the pharmacy. "Yeah, hopefully it hadn't been picked clean." Ellie replies, following behind me.
We make it to the pharmacy and duck under the partially open door. First thing I see is empty shelves upon shelves. Ellie stood on my left side. "Oh shit. It can't be cleaned out." I say, standing straight up again. "Eh, it might not be. Let's look around. If you find anything, tell me." Ellie says, looking at me.
I nodded and jogged over to the wall shelves and even looked under some fallen shelves. "Goddammit, nothing over here." I say, finding nothing. Ellie lets out a sigh at this. Needless to say, we weren't gonna stop there.
"What the hell? Did they just swallow the pills and leave the bottle? God…" Ellie says, holding an empty bottle in her hands. "Well shit. How greedy do these fuckers have to be?" I say, looking through another shelf. "Too greedy if I do say so myself." Ellie replied from the other side of the room. Her voice echoed off the walls.
"Fuck, come on, we don't have time for this shit." I say, still not finding anything. We were both starting to get frustrated because Joel could die if we don't hurry. "Of course, everything is picked clean." Ellie says, coming back over to me. "And here we believed that a pharmacy was supposed to have medicine. What a fucking shocker." I reply, hands on my hips.
We then decide to see what's behind the counter. There was something on the floor that just happened to catch my eye. I picked it up and read what it said, "Please Read! Pharmacist went crazy and attacked me. I hit him pretty hard. He's unconscious. I locked him in the American Princess store next door. Please get him help. Combination 35-30-31."
"Hey, Ellie. Look at this." I say, not looking away from the note. She jogged over to me and saw the note I was holding. "Oh, good find. The pharmacist might have something on him." she said. "Yeah, maybe some medicine." I say, putting the note up.
There was a pair of scissors and some bullets on the floor so we didn't leave this store empty handed. "Look, there's a door." Ellie says, trying to open the back door.
"It's locked. But there's a kit in there." Ellie says, looking through the rectangular window that was in the door. I looked through it and there was in fact a red first aid box just waiting for us to take it. "You're right. But how the hell do we get inside?" I ask. Ellie turned to look at me.
"There's gotta be a key nearby. Maybe that pharmacist has it on him." Ellie says, her hands on her hips. "Yeah, you're right. Let's go." I replied, hopping over the counter while Ellie walked through the opening in the counters.
We went back under the sliding door so we were in the corridors and made it to the princess store. Just as the note said, there was a combination lock on the door. "Take this one, Ellie. You know that I can't work with these types of locks." I ask her. "Oh I know." she said, kneeling down in front of the lock.
I rolled my eyes at this and let her work with the combination lock. As expected, she got it open on her first try. "Well, that worked." she said, pulling the lock off. I helped her open the door, which made a loud sound. However, it was filled with spores.
"Shit, spores." Ellie said, noticing the spores in the air. I quickly put on the gas mask that Tess had given to me many months before. "Holy shit." Ellie said, going under the door. "What?" I ask, breathing heavily as I go under. "You still look creepy with that on." she said, partly joking. "Yeah, I'm right at home." I chuckle, seeing just how dark it was in this store. She chuckled too.
"Think there's anything in here?" I ask, keeping my voice low so it wouldn't draw attention. "If there is, they can go ahead and fucking jump out at us." Ellie replied, remaining crouched. I crouched along with her.
We move through the store. There were spores stuck to the floor and it made the room hard to see. Dolls were left sitting in their glass containers, seeing that no one would pick them up again.
"Gah, yuck." Ellie exclaimed. I glance over and turn on my flashlight. In the corner was the pharmacist. He was covered in spores and cordyceps fungi. He looked like he had turned to a clicker already. It was so disgusting.
"Ah man. Don't come to life. Don't come to life." Ellie prayed, starting to search through his pockets. I crouched down with her. "Found the key." she said, pulling it out of his right pocket. "Awesome, now we're getting somewhere." I say happily. We have the key now we can get to that first aid kit.
Then, the pharmacist's body slouched forward, causing both of us to jump back in fright. "Oh fuck!" Ellie yelped, grabbing a hold of my arm with a semi tight grip. "Son of a bitch!" I growl, irritated by this. We definitely didn't need that.
"Even in death, he's being an asshole." I say, shaking it off. "You got that right." Ellie said, putting the key in her pocket. We start to head out of the store. That was until the sound of more clicking got us to crouch instantly.
"Shit." we both say in sync. There was a clicker outside of the door. It staggered passed us while making that awful clicking sound. I glance at Ellie, who gives me a nod. She'd be the one who would take out the clicker.
She slowly crouches her way to the undetected clicker while I hang back. Taking out her switchblade, she stabs the clicker in the back. It shrieked for a moment before falling to the ground dead. "It's all good." she tells me. I crawl out of the store and take off my gas mask and put it up.
We head back to the pharmacy and head directly to the door. Ellie unlocks it and we get into the next room. "Ah yes." Ellie says, quickly going to the first aid kit. I stand next to her and bend over to observe.
When she opened it, we were angered to see that it was empty. "No." Ellie says, kicking the box away from us. However, we weren't out of luck just yet. I spotted something on the other side of the window that was adjacent to us. "Wait a sec, look Ellie!" I say, seeing a military helicopter hanging off the ledge of this floor.
"Oh, a military helicopter. That's gotta have something." she says, knowing where we had to go next. "Yeah, we'll have better luck with that." I replied to her. We jumped over the window to the next area.
A majority of the floor had already caved in; making some of the area inaccessible to us. Luckily, there was another entrance to another area that was a salon from the looks of it. It had been split off into paths. We took the one that was the most stable.
Snow was covering the floors and the shelves and we had to crawl through another fallen shelf. It had led us over to a more spacious part of the salon. "Yeesh." Ellie shivered. There was a decomposing body sitting against the doorway. There was an open first aid kit sitting next to him. "No sutures." Ellie said, picking up some unused bandages, "We can still use this though." "Yeah, so at least we're getting something useful." I tell her.
We both leave the body and jump over something but I couldn't make out what it was. We had made it over to the other side of the fallen floor. So all we had to do from this point was to jump down to the floor.
"Well, stairs are blocked off. So it looks like we'll have to jump." I say, noticing the stairs being blocked off with a stray gate that had barbed wire on the top of it. "Yeah. Here we go." Ellie says, jumping over the railing and onto the floor below. "Okay, right behind you." I say, jumping down with her.
We were now met with another difficult idea of how to get up to the helicopter.