PROLOGUE
When the old man shoved the scalpel down Bruce's throat, Michael's blood ran cold. Crimson arterial blood spraying out. Toppling down the floor, limp like a ragdoll. Their eyes met, and Michael all but froze in his spot. Hard stare subjecting the fearful. Kari was on the floor, howling and shaking her head.
The smuggler went about unlatching the IV lines and the cables from the girl on the operating table. Like spiders cutting loose a prey. When she was freed, the old man took her in his armful and locked eyes with Michael as he kicked the door to the pediatrics and bolted into the murk. The alarms and the soldiers were seconds too late. Passing through the operating room just after the deed was done.
When Michael knelt for Bruce's pulse there was none.
The Last of Us: Incandescence
When he woke from his sleep, it was of another gunfire roaring on the lower floors. Fireflies fighting over the remaining supplies. The fourth gunning in a span of three days since Marlene's death. Michael never left his room on the hospital's fifth floor, opting to wait out the chaos. Killing a fellow human, no matter their stance, was never one of his penchants.
From the bed, he saw Kari hunching over the tabletop, eyes poring through the microscope lens. The slides were excised from the fungal culture. Grown from the girl's blood. They'd moved research tools and samples into Michael's cramped room the previous day. Though it'd been hours since Marlene's death, tension was nigh palpable in the air. He'd not crawl out from the room to help the injured nor the dying for the first time in years. Not even when they came knocking and begging at his door.
Kari sighed from the table and rubbed her eyes with her palm.
"Can't sleep?" Michael whispered.
"Still waiting for my head to knock itself out," she whispered back.
"Good. Your turn now." He said, climbing out of the single bed. The sky outside was brightening into a dark blue through the window outlooking the southern lot of St. Mary Hospital.
"Fuck you, Mike. You slept less than I did."
"It's all relative. Besides, I can't go back to sleep knowing they might try our doors agai-"
A knock came.
They stared wide-eyed at each other.
"Knew you guys were there. It's Robin." Through a lower gap of the door clinked a Firefly pendant pushed across. Kari took it soundlessly and turned the metallic pendant over. ROBIN DEACONS printed on the face. Michael put his finger on his lips and shook his head at Kari. She crossed her brows at him, pointing at the pendant. Mike mouthed out a word: fake.
"I got you food, water. I-"
Another voice spoke up. "We just want to talk. Won't shoot."
They paid the visitors no heed, standing there in the room, studying the door gap for movement.
The knocks came again, more impatient. "We know you had the samples there with you. No one saw you leave the building. You can't hide there forever."
They waited there in the silence and the dark, holding their breaths. Outside, they heard subtle hushed debates. Scuttling of boots over dingy floor. He'd little idea of what'd they do. He thought of coming out, but there's no way he wouldn't risk Kari or the samples.
From the door, a third voice spoke up. "Michael. It's Steve here. Leader of the Fireflies. We just want- We're sorry for Robin. Told us to go for you."
"Is he dead?" Michael relented. Kari stared at him, incredulous.
"We found a note on his uniform." A bloody piece of paper came through the door gap. Michael fetched and held it by the lamplight on the table. Robin's writing across the crumpled paper.
Mikey. If you're reading this, that means I'm already dead. Sorry.
Michael let out a ragged breath. He turned the paper over.
Whoever reads this, please don't harm Kari and Michael. We may lose some of our people, but they're our only hope. We can still have the cure. And Mike. Knew you had it in you.
The same voice spoke again, perhaps sounding more lifeless than before. Like a hangman at the end of his rope. "We just want to know if you can still work on the cure."
They sat huddled on the table under the dim light in what once was a cafeteria. Surrounded by the remaining fireflies in their uniforms, marred with sweat and blood. Military boxes stamped with Firefly insignia all around. Tables overturned for cover. Bullets lodged into crumbling walls. The shooting had ended with a clear victor, but the casualty was almost unimaginable.
Steve sat across the table, arms folded across his chest. He looked stern as ever as Marlene's second hand. Looking older beyond his age. Over the table were the samples. Vials in metallic frame holding the girl's blood. Orange fungi growing within an enclosed petri dish.
"I know you two were not soldiers, but I'm glad none of those rebels touched you or these," he gestured at the table. "So, tell us more about this 'vaccine'."
"The vaccine was Bruce's idea. We don't ... know how ..." Michael stammered.
"Shame we can't revive the dead doctor. Any breakthroughs from you two?"
Michael glanced at Kari. She was looking down, studying a smudge on the table. He cleared his throat. "The culture, those things, revealed nothing. We only knew that whatever's in the girl's blood, fungi or anything: her body's not fighting it."
Some of the Firefly nodded in apprehension.
"We can do one ... thing. Just to know if we can replicate the situation. But this would need ... something more."
"And that is?"
"A willing host. To be infected."
Murmurs of disappointment spreading through the circle.
"But this needs an already-infected host. Just like Marlene's girl. Bitten over three days but didn't turn."
"And the fungal culture," Kari blurted out. "The lab tests, the MRI result. We found this fungus is just like any other. The colors, the shape. Even under the microscope, there's little to no difference."
Michael gave more detail. "Yeah, and the only difference we found were the lab tests which revealed no inflammation and the MRI showing a different growth. It's supposed to grow over here," Michael said circling his ears. "To induce the host's aggression. The girl doesn't have any growing over there."
Steve frowned at them, stroking his beard. "But how does this finding ... work on towards ... making the cure?"
Michael glimpsed Kari resorting back to the smudge on the table. There's no sugarcoating the bitter truth. He hesitated before answering. "We need to see if it's something from the fungus or some genetic mutation from the girl's part."
"So, it's only a test?"
He looked at the fungi growing on the culture media. The orange caps looking like eyes, looking at him, blaming him. "Yes."
It didn't take longer than a week for the few remaining Fireflies to slip away in groups of three or four. Slinking away at night. One morning he woke up to find Kari's belongings all gone. The samples were still on her table. Not even a simple word of goodbye.
Michael slid the last two vials of the girl's blood into a small cushioned bag and shoved it down his pack, bundled in his clothes. Pinned to the backpack's front were bluebirds of various kinds. From beneath his pillow, he took a photo wrapped in plastic. A different man from a different era looking back. Families all around. He studied a young girl looking no older than fifteen. Perhaps when the time comes, he could give her the bluebird pins he'd collected. He slipped the photo into his shirt pocket and wore a utility belt around his waist. For the essentials: gasmask, pistol, lighter. In case he had to abandon his pack and make a run for his life.
He shouldered the pack on, sneaked downstairs to the second floor, threw his pack down, swung his legs over, and landed square on his feet. A slight pain coursed through his left thigh at the impact, but it left as soon as it'd come. Then he slung his pack over his shoulder and clicked his headlight on and loped into the dark. Somewhere in the blackness, the night was alive with the sound of clicking.
The first pack of infected were wandering within a nearby overgrown park. Clickers and stalkers, wailing and clicking for prey. They were a ragged group, jerking and groaning with no purpose. Like lost souls wandering the great unknown.
Scattered on the ground were debris from the ruined park. He took a sizable rock in hand and pitched it into the dark. The collision was but a dull thud, but the effect was apparent. The restless infected came to attention. Twisting at the disturbance, howling and sprinting toward it.
He took an empty glass bottle from the ground and lobbed it further. The crash drew more groans. He sneaked toward the other side of the park as the infected pulled away. On the wall was a ladder and he climbed it and leaped down into the bus station, a Quarantine Zone long abandoned.
People crowding behind concrete walls brought about in haste, hungry and scared in their ragged clothes. The walls were all that stood between them and the wailing terrors. FEDs firing oncoming infected and civilians alike from above the gates with no selection. The screams of the slaughtered. By day the yard before the gate turned makeshift graveyard for cars and the dying left within. What had they done? Fear was their only motivation, their only justification. But he knew saving the few was never worth killing the many.
No infected within the wall. Michael half-remembered a secure place by the triage. He rested there on the damp bunkbed laying dry cardboards over it to sleep and it was one a night out of many he'd rest not hearing his name screamed in horror in his dreams.
It was already mid-morning when he rose from his bed and stood stretching his spine and ate a cold breakfast of ration biscuits. Water from his flask to flush down the bitter aftertaste. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and set out for the highways. Wildflowers and moss thriving over broken asphalt. Rust-covered vehicles abandoned on the streets. Thick vines trailing over walls cracked by years of rainfall. There were no infected in sight as he walked the road.
He assumed that Colorado was somewhere west. Years abandoned already when infected broke into the facility. His heart wrenched in guilt. Of progress left behind to gather the dust and vanish among the dead. He thought waiting for a volunteer was an option, but he never imagined what such desperate people could do. He needed to evacuate the samples. There would be no making any cure here. On his desk in the hospital was a letter to the remaining Fireflies. He hoped the meds he left there could redeem him.
Further along, the road crested and there he saw the landscape expand before him. State parks filled with creeping plants and brambles. Greenery covering the whole decaying city left to ruined version of themselves. Like literal concrete jungle. In the air, the lilts of birds mingled with the lush aroma of the spring breeze. The sound of a river somewhere hidden in the undergrowth. He thought if somehow the cure was found the world at last would all regrow. Like the enduring world cradled by nature, all of it rebuilt from the dust and ashes.
He stopped for the evening because the pain was growing sharper in his left thigh. Shrapnels too deep to recover without risking his entire leg. He'd been stocking cocaine leaves from trades. Not enough still to buy him a half-hour worth of anesthesia. He rested on the hood of a jeep overgrown by shrubbery and took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the metal hood. Then he just sat watching the clouds above morph into unrecognizable shapes. Then he looked out through the trees toward the distant ridges.
The roads ahead clogged by fallen remnants of a skyscraper. A low rumble coming from the dark sky overhead. He'd no other way to take but through the ruins.
Spores thick in the rank air. He unlatched the gasmask dangling from his belt and wore it on, sucking in and out. The spores clung to his clothes as he ventured into the pale green mist. Almost impossible to see further than five feet ahead. He heard no shuffling in the deep. No tell-tale moans. Passing through the cramp corridors, he found the culprit at one corner latched to the wall. Molds growing all over. Cannibalizing flesh and matter for dissemination. Orange caps sprouting over broken skin with the rotting eyes tender enough for juvenile caps to pierce through.
He thought he heard rampant clicks somewhere in the dark of night. Then the wind shifted and there was just the dull drizzle.
The next morning, he was rotating the blood vials to make sure they didn't clot when he heard noises. He gathered everything at once. There were five rounds left in the magazine. Only four left to dish out and let loose.
He chose to huddle on the second floor of an abandoned marketplace when he saw the first of them. All runners. Perhaps from a nearby QZ or some community. He was about to lie in wait when he saw someone running through the glass doors—a kid. Michael looked around him and saw a ladder by the side of the second floor. If he passed it down, the boy could lose the infected, but they'd have little time to hide.
He called for the boy and let the ladder reach the ground. He readied his pistol as the boy climbed and all but clawed his way up. Three shots were fired to buy the boy a few precious seconds. When the boy had climbed over, he pushed the ladder down and dragged the kid by his hand into a storefront reinforced with steel door. They ducked underneath the door and pulled the door down and slammed it shut.
The infected were still going after them through the escalators. When Michael glanced at the kid, he saw it. A bite wound raw on his forearm. Looking around, the room had no other exit in sight but what looked to be a saferoom with a thick metal door.
Even as his mind all but screamed at him to run and flee, he thought of the immune girl in the hospital and her infection. He took a shot that just might never come again.
"What's your name, kid?"
The boy stood watching, hands on his waist, catching his breath. He was small and squat, with swift legs that emphasized his speed.
"Your people?" He gestured at the infected.
The boy didn't answer.
Michael took a bandage from his pack and lifted it. "I'm a doctor, okay? Gimme your arm." When Michael reached for his arm, the boy looked to have just noticed his bite wound. But he bore a look of defiance against it. "Gimme your arm. I can help."
The boy flinched, looking around the room for escape.
"Hey, hey," Michael soothed. "It's going to be okay."
The boy stilled, eyeing Michael with suspicion. He took his chance for the boy's arm. The wound looked clean enough. Perhaps no older than an hour.
"Here. This way." They squatted behind the counter to hide from the infected. "When did this happen?"
"I-I don't know," The boy stammered, his voice thin and on the verge of tears. There was light enough from the windows, so he took his flask from his hip and rummaged through his pack for bandage and alcohol. He folded a piece of cloth for the boy to bite into as he poured water over the wound and washed the blood away, the boy grimacing at the pain. After pouring alcohol over the injury, he gave the boy a sympathetic look, telling him the pain would escalate. Michael held his knife over his lighter for a while and pressed it onto the wound. The boy looked as if he might pass out but he held on. He wrapped his forearm with a bleached bandage and gave him a Fluconazole tab for good measure and let the boy rest on a dusty couch by the counter.
After an hour the boy shook with fever. He looked to be enduring great pain, perhaps from the burn. His face looked like an unwanted youth in his earlier days. Scars marring his face. A healing burn wound by his left ear.
"How are you feeling?" Michael asked from his seat.
"I don't want. To turn. Please. The gun," the boy wheezed.
"Hey, it's okay. You're doing just fine." But Michael already saw a hint of red creeping through the boy's eyes. "Here," he said, rummaging his pack. "Let me give you something for the fever."
"No," he coughed. "Just. The gun."
"You're not going to turn," Michael insisted. He knelt by the boy and looked for his vein in the dim and pushed the needle and the syringe's content in.
Then he slipped the syringe into his pocket and heard it clink with the blood vial.
"You're not going to turn," he whispered, more to himself.
The boy's fever seemed to recede by the hour and Michael saw a glimmer of hope beyond the murky predilection. He rose from his seat and sorted through his pack when he heard the boy rustle from behind. He returned the lighter, knife, and flask into his belt, took a roll of bandage for the boy, and zipped his pack close and stood and turned. He stopped. The boy stood staring back at him. His eyes unnatural. Face contorted in rage.
He screamed at Michael and lunged. Michael unrolled the bandage and held it up and let the boy's teeth sink into it. They toppled into the floor. But the infected milling about the storefront heard the cry. They began beating and rioting against the front door as Michael wrestled the boy over and reached for his gun in his belt and pressed it on the boy's temple.
His eyes blurred and he saw the boy's face beneath him shift into his sister's. Screaming at him. Calling him. He'd did what needed to be done. But as he struggled to hold the boy down, he found himself unable to pull the trigger.
Out of nowhere, a lance of heat through his entire left thigh. He gritted his teeth. The shrapnel had struck a nerve. Then he heard the front door creak in protest against the weight thrown against it. When the entire front door ripped from the ceiling, he'd little time as he jumped from the boy and gripped his pistol and limped toward the saferoom. As the infected neared and the pain in his leg grew nigh unbearable, he made it just in time to slam the heavy door close and turn the locking mechanism.
The sound of infected slamming and banging at the door. The room inky black. He slid down the door feeling for his left thigh. He wouldn't be able to walk for hours now. Patting for the lighter in his belt, he took it and flicked it on. Plastic boxes on steel racks. Damp floors filled with dust and mold. Walls of concrete with only one exit.
When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light. Held in hand, the last vial containing the girl's blood. Numb, grief-stricken, pallid. The world slowly losing its colors. He studied the small leaden tube, his face reflected in the flickering light. So red. The sanguine fluid making no sound as he rotated the vial upside and down. He'd little notion if all the road ends at this moment. Locked in a room, infected banging on the door.
He roughed his shirt for the photo. Faces unmarred by trauma looking back at him. He looked at the girl by his side. Trying to remember how she looked, how she laughed. How she begged him to save her when he couldn't. Her sullen eyes gazing back at him, blaming him. Trying instead to remember how she smiled. Her face.
Without thinking, he unpocketed the knife and held his arm in the faint light. Serpentine veins streaking over pale skin. He felt no pain as he punctured his skin with the knife's edge. The red matching in intensity to the one held in the glass tube. Then he pulled the vial's cap off and held it in one hand and took a breath before pouring it over his knife wound.
Hours later he began to feel a chill creeping down his spine. He stood tottering in the cold and the dark and dug through the dusty boxes, suppressing coughs with teary eyes. In the boxes were threadbare blankets he pulled and wrap about himself.
In his dream, he was sick and his sister cared for him. He thought he saw a pistol in her hand as they waited. The following day she was gone, leaving him to turn but it was hard to wish for death when you can't do anything but scream.
When he opened his eyes again, he came to notice the pain wreaking all over his body. Creaking in his joints. Shivering violently like a metal pole left in the cold.
The temperature never relented. Rising higher and higher until Michael felt his insides turn into goo. He never imagined if a fever was supposed to occur. No supplies and no bandage but his shirt torn at the edge to staunch the blood. The pistol sat on the rack. He waited on and curled into the blanket.
He could feel no more pain in his leg. No sound but his heartbeat. There was no telling apart if it's just the dark of the room or the fungi growing over his brain and taking his sight out. All he knew was void. The numbness spreading through. He thought little of the sister he couldn't save and of the bitter end waiting for him. The blood and the knife wound. Delusions pathetic beyond description he was a prisoner to it. He thought that if he turned there'd be no killing for him and he took small comfort from it. What of the cure for the world that never deserved it? All his years wasted and this was his trophy. And what of the end to mankind? To lay down and rest and never open your eyes? There is no cure in this godforsaken land nor returning the world to what it was and there is no other story to tell.
Two days later he woke with a gasp from a violent dream. Damp clothes sticking to his skin. No sound from outside. He thought it would be hard to move, but he could just do it and felt the ground for his lighter. As it flicked into life, the cramped room coalesced into sight. The pistol was still sitting on the rack and he took with shaky hand and pressed it onto his temple. He squeezed his eyes shut for a while. Until he relented and felt for his forehead. Cold and clammy with perspiration.
He tried standing but his knees could just bear his weight and he leaned on the rack. No pain from his left leg. A dull edge right on his arm. He felt for his bandage and the dried red soaking through. The vial was somewhere buried in the blankets. He took his pistol in hand and hobbled toward the door and turned the handle opposite ways and pushed it open.
The light he saw from the outside was almost blinding.