Chapter 4

The basement door turned out to be locked. No matter how much she tried the handle, it didn't want to budge. That was telling. She'd seen this kind of scenario before. One parent had been bitten, the other had locked them in to protect the kids and then been bitten themselves. With him unable to get in to her, but able to attack anything that strayed too close and her unable to get out or have any real access to food, the fungus must have struggled to establish itself in the basement's conditions and the lack of food caused it to consume the host to have any hope of metabolising with anything. This wasn't the first time she'd come across it and it wouldn't be the last. But while she normally chose not to focus on it, that was proving an impossibility this time. These had been Marlene's parents. The fact that this was so close to home made it personal.

Seeing that the door was locked, she stepped back and drew her pistol again. She didn't want to have to try shooting it off, but time was a thing she was short on. She now knew there was another infected and that it was aware of her. If it had run off, it could be anywhere now. That meant she had to make sure Joel was safe. He wasn't in any shape to be fighting. That, more than anything else, was what decided her course of action. She didn't hesitate to pull the trigger and watch as the lock on the door shattered. It swung open easily enough and she pushed through it before breaking into a run as she noticed the stairs to the right at the end of the hall. She was slower than she'd have liked weighed down as she was by the cans of food that were now in her backpack, but she'd sooner be weighed down by too much food than too much junk in this case.

She raced up the stairs, keeping her pistol ready as she navigated the corners and barged through the final door before trying to work out the route back to the living room from where the basement stairwell had spat her out. She seemed to be in some kind of play room with toys littering the floor. For a moment, she was mentally dragged back to when she and Joel stood in the toy shop with Sam and Henry during their brief alliance. There were no toy robots here that she could see, but still Sam's voice rang in her head.

"My backpack is practically empty."

"What's the rule about taking stuff?"

"It weighs like nothing!"

"The rule!"

"... We only take what we have to."

The memory was so real, so vivid, that it momentarily paralysed her. It wasn't that she'd had time to get especially close to Sam. Still, he'd been pretty cool. And he'd cared. That was a rare thing in the world they lived in. Had he lived, she knew he'd had the potential to be a great friend. As much as she hated Joel teasing her and saying that she liked each of the boys at Jackson, saying that he had 'an instinct for these things', she was grateful that he'd never done it about Sam. She could tolerate it when it was about people who were alive. Especially since one day he would see for himself how wrong he truly was.

After a few seconds, she was able to shake off the disorientation. The memory of Sam and Henry was gone. She refocused and headed through the door at the opposite end of the room and into the main hallway. All the other doors in that hallway were shut, but she knew instantly where she was going since she could see the front door. She broke into as good of a flat-out sprint as she could with all the weight on her back. As she got level with the stairs, she raised her pistol and covered the stairway to ensure nothing was standing at the top waiting to throw a mycotoxin sack at her. Fortunately though, nothing was ready to ambush her.

She knocked on the door to the living room and heard the lethargic effort of Joel straining to move whatever he'd put in front of the door out the way to let her in. She slipped inside and helped him move it back into place before slinging her backpack off with a resounding thud as it hit the floor. In seconds she was unloading the extra weight that had slowed her down for those potentially fatal minutes with eagerness. Joel watched her haul emerge from the backpack with growing fascination.

"Where in the hell did you find all that?"

"I hit the fucking jackpot!" She tried to keep the triumph out of her voice and remain focused on the fact that there was still at least one infected active in the house. "We've got infected. I killed one but there's at least one still around. I think-" She stopped cold as an unexpected wave of emotion slammed into her hard enough to throw her off balance and knock the breath out of her. That had only ever happened once before: when she knew the person who was infected. When she was emotionally connected to the act of having to kill them. It was the entire reason she'd formed such a detachment to the act in the first place.

"Hey, you okay, kiddo?" Joel had picked up on the fact that she'd choked and was now making his way over. He still looked a little off balance, but certainly seemed to be recovering well. She was hoping that the food was good and would give him the boost he needed to properly get back on his feet. She swallowed the lump in her throat and forced the words out. The last thing she needed was him thinking she wasn't okay doing this and try to push himself into something he wasn't up for.

"I think they're Marlene's parents." The words hurt. She physically felt them stabbing her in the chest. She did her best to ignore it and not let him see the tears that were threatening to spill over. "I dealt with one. I think it was the mother. The father's still running around but I'll catch up to him."

"Well you be careful, okay?" Joel said as she pulled the shotgun out from where it was sticking out the top of her backpack and took a good look at it properly for the first time. Just as she'd expected, it was a fine shotgun. There wasn't a scratch on it, but it was in need of a cleaning. Still, she highly doubted that she'd get so lucky if she found other weapons. "Where'd you get that?" She looked up to see Joel was now staring at the shotgun.

"No way!" she laughed as she scooped it up protectively. "This one's mine! Hands off, motherfucker!"

"Hey, I just wanna have a look." Joel said, chuckling as she passed it over to him. He turned it over in his hands expertly and once again Ellie was reminded that he'd been doing this for long before the Cordycepts even hit since it was legal to own guns in America even then. "Yeah, that is a fine shotgun." With that, he passed it back to her. "You bring that back to Jackson with us, you'll want to hide that from Tommy. He'll probably want to add that to the armoury."

"Noted." Unable to stop herself from grinning, she re-slung it through her backpack strap. She pulled the backpack on again and stood back up as she assessed her weapons. She had her pistol and two and a half clips left and she had the shotgun with six rounds. She was doing pretty good. But that other infected was on its way to being a bloater. There was no telling how well her standard pistol rounds would be able to impact its fungal plates. It took a stupid amount of headshots to kill a clicker. She had a worrying gut feeling that this thing would make a standard clicker seem like a pushover.