The Last of Us

Based on the story by Neil Drukmann

Disclaimer

The Last of Us was written for Naughty Dog on behalf of Sony Computer Entertainment by Neil Drukmann and Bruce Straley. It is a trademark property of Sony Computer Entertainment. This is a not-for-profit fan-work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No infringement of trademark or copyright is intended.

Author's Notes

I haven't seen a 'decent' straight novelisation of the game story so far and it was this that led me to start work on this. However, as I continued, I decided that, whilst I will be avoiding OCs, I wasn't content to just turn Neil Drukmann's fine story into a narrative story form. There was one change about which I had lots of ideas. With encouragement of a few other fans of the game, I decided to take this story in this new direction. I hope that I won't be changing any of the key points and themes but I really, really wanted to make this change.

You'll see what I mean in time.

Censor – M – Violence, profanity and description of death and disease

Act 1 – Summer

Chapter 1 – The Quarantine Zone

Twenty years later…

Joel Miller came awake with a painful jerk, Sarah's name dying on his lips before it was uttered.

He hated bad dreams. He hated the fact that he had a hard time sleeping without reliving that night when the End of the World began all over again. Most of all, he hated the fact that, no matter how hard he tried, how much he tried to tell himself that he'd moved on and crushed as much of his humanity beneath the stone façade of Survival as he could, that he still could not stop himself from feeling the agony as Sarah body went limp in his arms.

Joel rubbed his face through his salt-and-pepper beard and suddenly realised that it wasn't just the dream that woke him. Someone was banging on the door of his apartment, loudly and repeatedly.

With a groan, Joel hauled himself to his feet, feeling every second of his fifty years. "All right, all right! I'm coming!"

Joel strode angrily through his apartment (power was off, as always at this time of day, so no electric lights, air conditioning or even god-damned fans to help deal with the scorching summer heat). He spared not a glance for the various stacked boxes that contained the few possessions that he wasn't wearing on his back or for the tattered Venetian blinds with more damaged slats than intact. He walked to the door in the combined kitchenette/living area. It didn't look like an apartment of someone living in the United States anymore; he doubted anyone outside the highest ranks of the Military and their associated bureaucracy had that sort of luxury. If anything, the piles of stockpiled clothes, food and water plus a water bucket for hygiene purposes was more like something out of the Third World of Joel's youth. Of course, nowadays, that was the most for which anyone could really hope. He'd got used to it over the last decade or so. It was one of the many prices of surviving the End of the World.

Without bothering to look through the spy-hole, Joel yanked the door open. He only knew one person who knocked on the door like that.

Tess looked like hell. Although she was wearing her usual neutral and slightly mocking expression, her knuckles were bloodied and she had bruising on her face and even cuts on her right cheek and over her right brow. The brunette woman (Joel's room-mate, 'business' partner and occasional fuck-buddy, when the loneliness and horror of life in the Boston Quarantine Zone got too much for both of them) smirked slightly and pushed past Joel into the apartment.

"How was your morning?" she asked, her voice laden with sarcasm. Joel restrained the need to reply in kind (something like 'Obviously better than yours' came to mind but would be a lie). Tess walked over to a new bottle of whiskey (not the official-brand rotgut you got from the Ration Dispensary; the good stuff, culled from their commercial stock for personal use). The woman poured herself a full finger of the liquor and roughly thrust the bottle at Joel. "Want some?"

Joel stamped down on several contradictory impulses. He wanted to hug Tess and try to soothe away the obvious pain she was suffering. He wanted to shout at her for wandering off on her own in an urban jungle that, frankly, was never as safe as the Federal Disaster Recovery Agency (FEDRA) claimed it was. There was a bit of him that wished he was the one running this show so he could order her not to do dumb stuff like this ever again (as if that would work). Instead, he just chose to turn his back on that mocking smile and the warmth that he saw in her eyes a lot nowadays but the ramifications of which he wasn't ready to handle.

"No I… don't want some," he said at last.

Tess leaned against the kitchen table and sipper her liquor with a distracted expression on her face. "Well, I have some interesting news for you…"

"Where were you Tess?"

"West End District." Joel's expression did his talking for him and Tess became slightly defensive. "Hey! We had a drop to make!"

"We." Joel put a lot of emphasis into that one syllable. "We had a drop to make."

"Hey, you wanted 'to be alone', remember?"

Joel turned away again, his fists clenched; he took a moment to calm himself. "So, I'll take one guess: The whole deal went south and the client made off with the pills and our payment? Is that about right?"

Needing something to do with his hands, he grabbed a bit of rag that was allegedly a dishcloth in a former life, wet it (the water was running today, miracles of miracles; it even looked mostly like water without the usual yellowish tinge from decayed piping) and then walked back over to Tess to clean the woman's cuts and bruises.

Tess chuckled, a surprisingly light and young sound from such a world-weary woman and, with an impatient snort, she yanked the cloth out of his hands and started to work on her injuries. "The deal went through without a hitch!" Tess paused in her tentative dabbing at the cut on her cheek and reached into her tight worker's jeans to pull out a thick sheaf of perforated green cards. In a world where the only things left with value were those things with intrinsic value as a means of survival, money and even precious metals had long since lost any power as currency, these were the measure of wealth in Boston: The means to get food, clothing, medicine and even services for your chosen bolt-hole. "Enough Ration Cards to last the two of us for a month at least, even factoring in bribes and expenses!"

"So you wanna explain this?" Joel gestured at Tess's injuries.

Tess grimaced. "On my way back, I got jumped by these two assholes." Joel straightened, his eyes narrowing dangerously and his whole body language demanding more details. "Yeah, they got a few hits in but…" Tess considered Joel's posture and expression and felt strangely defensive. "Look, I managed!" she snapped out.

Joel sighed and finally succumbed to his concern for his partner; he snatched the towel out of her hands and began working on her cuts again. Tess didn't argue but simply submitted to his ministrations, pain doubtlessly overriding pride. "Are these 'two assholes' still with us?" Joel asked, already thinking how to make the underworld of Boston remember that he and his were off-limits for any kind of violence or intimidation.

Tess's smile suddenly turned predatory. "That's funny!" No-one with a brain took Tess lightly; she was more than capable of beating a guy to death with nothing but her fists.

Joel raised an eyebrow. "Did you bother to find out who they were before you caved in their heads like they was old eggshells?"

"Look, they were just a couple of nobodies; they don't matter. What matters is that Robert fucking sent them!"

Now that was news. "Robert? Our Robert?"

"Bastard knows we're looking for him; must have figured that he'd better take us out before we find him."

Joel shook his head in anger. "That son of a bitch is smart."

The Quarantine Zones were better than being out in the wilds but that wasn't really saying much; it was still far from a land of plenty. FEDRA strictly controlled what was available to the Zone's ordinary citizenry. For over a decade, almost everything one could own was strictly rationed and only issued if one could prove to the agency that represented the last tattered remains of the government of the United States of America that you had a good reason to have it. 'Good' by the standards of the senior staff officers and their pet bureaucrats who now held most if not all the governmental power. Some things were never going to be available of course. Working personal electronics? More than the most basic medical supplies? Forget about those; they were 'prioritised goods' – in other words only operational military units and the top of the top echelons got them regularly. You could certainly forget owning a weapon unless you had a great hiding place or if you were desperate or dumb enough to be willing to risk summary execution.

Of course, as at any time in human history where the government tried to restrict distribution and ownership of anything, groups of 'entrepreneurs' with limited (or no) respect for the law rose up to supply those who didn't believe that legal restrictions trumped their desire to own things and had enough wealth to pay for the inevitable cost of the supply. Although FEDRA controlled pretty much all of the production capability of what was left of the country, there was a huge amount of stuff left over from before the Outbreak lying around in the ruins of human civilisation. Much of it was in surprisingly good condition.

The black market in the Boston QZ had several layers. Joel and Tess, as smugglers, had the particular speciality of sneaking items salvaged from outside the fortified walls of the zone to the inside (and sometimes vice-versa). However, apart from small shipments for specific customers, the two of them had neither the contacts, the organisation nor the disposable wealth (to make officials look the other way) to run a significant distribution network of their own. Thus, they had to rely on black marketers, people like Robert, to sell on their goods to the good citizens of the Zone.

Generally, the system worked very well but the chance of double-cross was always a looming threat. Robert had clearly decided that he preferred to sell on Tess and Joel's latest shipment of weapons and ammunition without the two smugglers' pay-off eating into his profit margin. He'd simply disappeared with the stock.

Tess broke into Joel's musing by walking over to him with an urgent and eager expression. "No, he's not smart enough. I know where he's hiding!"

Now that got Joel's attention. "Like hell you do!"

Tess smirked. "Old warehouse over in Area 5," she said with an air of triumph. "No telling how long he'll be there though."

Joel's dark expression betrayed no emotion but Tess could see his determination and the lethal will that had once made him one of the most feared Hunters in the Gulf States. "I'm ready now," he growled.

"Oh, I can do now!"

Joel and Tess stepped out of their apartment block into a back alley. Everywhere there were signs of the decay that had consumed the once bustling city. Piles of uncleared garbage, paving stones shattered into uneven shards and a singular absence of the sound of air conditioning units, the one-time summertime chorus of urban America.

Overhead, on the roof of the building, a soldier armed with an assault rifle strode back and forwards uneasily, watching the people beneath him. Every time Joel walked around the Quarantine Zone, the comparison with some kind of prison camp got stronger. Of course, that is more or less what it was. It was just that monsters this prison was created to house were the ones outside the walls.

Joel didn't bother to look at his watch – its action broken and its face shattered by a bullet from an assault rifle – a keepsake from a dead world and from a dead girl whom he still tried to convince himself didn't matter to him anymore twenty years after her murder. "Curfew's in a couple of hours," he remarked.

"Then we'd better get moving," Tess responded, the desire to confront Robert practically making her vibrate with eagerness.

The two set off for the gate onto the main street, as they did so, they passed a two of their neighbours, a man and a woman. The woman had received her 'Compulsory Civilian Work Order', basically her draft papers forcing her to do dangerous work outside of the walls of the Quarantine Zone – anything from repairing the outside of the fortress-like facility's walls to scavenging in the ruins of the rest of the city. It wasn't exactly popular work; far too many of the Infected were crowding too close to the city for anyone but those with the most vital business to willingly go beyond the walls whilst not armed to the teeth…

Naturally, the Army did not permit these work crews to carry weapons.

"You got your call-up for this shit, Joel?" the woman asked. Joel answered in the negative; the woman smirked and laughed in response. She hadn't expected him to; after all, it wasn't as if the authorities actually knew he existed. It was an ill-kept secret in the building that Joel and Tess weren't legal residents of the Zone. They had false ID papers and were engaged in illegal activities. No-one really cared at this point but Joel was cynical enough to know that, when things got really bad, all these nice people who turned a blind eye to their presence would be going running to the Military to turn them in.

Joel followed Tess through a gate and down an alleyway past dumpsters piled high with garbage bags; who knows how long they'd been here? FEDRA tried to keep the city's essential services running but power and manpower were both in only intermittent supply. Garbage was just piling up faster than it could be burned (sometimes without even bothering to check for potential recyclable materials first).

On arriving on the street, Joel looked around; once again the comparison to half-remembered TV images of the Third World struck him hard. All the shop fronts were shuttered and there was no indication of any private commerce. The only shop-front not long since obliterated by graffiti was a double unit with a moderately-clean sign declaring it to be the 'Ration Distribution Centre'. Another armed military lookout paced restlessly on top of that particular building with other armed guards standing outside its shuttered front.

"All residents must have current valid ID. Co-operation with city personnel is mandatory!" The subtly threatening announcement in a bland female voice was cycling over and over again over the PA speakers on every street corner as a HMMWV armoured car with a fifty-calibre machine gun turret roared past. Yeah, you didn't need to be a genius to figure that there was a lot of tension on the streets right now!

The cause of the nervousness of the various guards was easy to see. Virtually every flat surface was covered in the slogans and symbology of the Fireflies. 'Rise!' 'Look to the Light' and the omnipresent 'dragonfly' logo. The fact that the Fireflies were able to operate so openly would make Joel nervous too if he were in the Military, so he couldn't exactly blame these guys.

Joel had mixed feelings about the Fireflies. On one hand, he had no love for FEDRA and its various organs. Whilst on first glance, they were practically the only thing holding a hint of law and order together, in practice they were just a larger and better-equipped type of bandit clan. The QZs were little better than prison camps to provide manpower and a safe operating location for their attempts to control what few resources that remained in America.

That said, the Fireflies were, in Joel's mind, the worst kind of delusional idealists. Always talking about 'the restoration of freedom and constitutional government' as if that were even remotely possible with the way everything had turned into shit in the aftermath of the Outbreak. With around four-fifths of the population dead, infected or living in the wilds, there was precious little country to restore to anything and the thought that people would tamely submit to a 'restored constitutional government' was enough to make even the grim Texan smirk.

Of course, the fact that the Fireflies were hopeless dreamers didn't make them any less dangerous. They were a well-trained militia that had proven that, with non-military and jerry-rigged equipment, one could fight toe-to-toe with the far-better-equipped FEDRA military (which still styled itself the US Army). FEDRA kept this beyond-top secret of course but Joel and Tess weren't reliant on 'official information sources' (which rarely said anything these days anyway). From their various contacts from outside the QZ, mostly scavengers who were also their suppliers, they knew that the Fireflies had successfully fomented rebellions in several QZs. There was an undeclared civil war going on and, understandably, the level of Firefly activity in the Boston QZ made the military jumpy and trigger-happy. That's why even smugglers and black marketers went to a lot of trouble to remain under the radar or at least non-threatening.

Of course, the primary reason why Joel had mixed feelings about the Fireflies was because of his brother, Tommy. The very thought made Joel grimace. His younger brother had always been the idealistic one of the pair of them. However, the fact that Tommy had chosen such a radically different path and looked down on his older brother's choices so uncompromisingly remained a deep personal wound.

A few people were outside this day. The majority of those who were braving the summer streets of the Zone were behind the fenced-off queuing area for the Ration Distribution Centre. "Hey! When are you opening?" a woman yelled at a harassed-looking military guard standing by the shuttered door to the 'shop'.

"We'll open when the rations arrive!" the guard responded. "You'll know as soon as we do, lady!"

Tess was leaning on a concrete divider and was watching events as Joel joined her. "That's what? The third time this month the ration queue opened late?" Tess murmured, loud enough for him to hear but not to carry to the twitchy and violence-prone soldiers. "Supplies must be runnin' short again!" Joel just nodded. FEDRA were trying to keep a lid on it but people like Joel and Tess knew the truth – fewer and fewer farms, factories and mines were operating (or, if they were operating, were willing to supply the QZs for free anymore). Whilst this was good news for the Black Market, Joel also knew that the collapse of the supply chain was the first step to the collapse of the QZ altogether and he knew what was hiding behind those walls for the collapse of order to come boiling in like a tide of death.

It wasn't just the Infected… and they weren't even the worst thing, both out there and in the human heart. Joel knew that better than anyone, in his humble opinion.

"Watch it man!" Joel looked over at the other side of the street. The Military had set up a very basic cordon with some wooden barriers and an armed guard at the junction of every barrier. An officer (who else would be wearing full body armour and a helmet with a Lexan faceplate on a police operation?) was pacing nervously. As Joel watched, soldiers began to lead four ragged looking civilians out. Ignoring their cries of protest, the soldiers forced all four to kneel with their hands on their heads.

One by one, two soldiers wearing full NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) Warfare protection kits began to process the four squatters, using a hand-held device that they pressed to the earlobe. The device was considered fool-proof as it could only be triggered by blood containing the infrared-fluorescing spores of Cordyceps Brain Infection.

Cordyceps…

Or, to give it its scientific name, ophidiocordyceps unilateralis. Before the Outbreak, Joel had been just a builder, not a biologist. However, by bitter necessity he had become familiar with this strange parasitic life-form.

Like many fungi, Cordyceps was a parasite that lived inside other living beings, using both its host body mass and the nutrients that the host consumed to sustain itself. When it was first discovered, Cordyceps was considered purely a bug-killer. The spores got into the unfortunate bug and took over its motor nerves, turning it into a walking infection vector. Usually, the fungus would force its victim to walk to a high place where it would then be paralysed as the fungus consumed the creature's flesh to create its fruiting bodies, which would then waft down the spores on further unfortunate bugs, spreading the infection further.

Cordyceps was considered a curiosity; indeed, it was even hoped to turn the strange effects of large doses of its spores on the human mind into a useful psychiatric medicine and its immune system-supressing properties an anti-rejection drug for organ transplants.

No one knew precisely how this bug-killing wonder turned into the nightmare that it became. Joel remembered reading in the newspapers during that last, horrible week that it was believed to have been imported into the US through contaminated fruit shipments from South America. According to Tommy, some conspiracy theorists suggested that some biotech company had been messing with the fungus, trying to turn it into a non-polluting insecticide, tests of which they had been secretly carrying out on some commercial farm in South America and that no-one had realised how dangerous the spores were until it was too late.

In the end, it didn't matter. It turned out that this mutated Cordyceps was just as effective with humans as it was with ants at controlling hosts and spreading rapidly through dense populations of its chosen host.

Once the spores got into the human body, the fungal mycelium would rapidly spread through the body, binding itself to the nervous system until it reached the brain where it would assemble its controlling core. From there, it would quickly infiltrate and take over the sensory and motor control parts of the brain, turning the host's body into an extension of itself with fairly simple instinctive responses to seek uninfected humans and spread the infection further, usually by biting.

After a while, the growing mass of fungus would burst open the skull at weak points such as the optic nerve apertures and the join of the skull bones in the crown. It would then develop into a grotesque, crown-like mass of bioluminescent fruiting bodies where the head above the line of the upper mandible of the mouth had once been. After a while, once the nutrients in the host's body were used up, the fungus would simply stop the host moving in a cool, dark place and have it settle down for its final rest. Then it would grow into its final form, a huge fruiting colony covering a dozen square feet that would pour huge amounts of spores into the air over a period of years before it finally used up all its remaining nutrients and died off.

The thing was that, especially if infected by spores, it could take up to 48 hours for the host to fall victim to the first stage of the fungus's control of their body. With modern air travel and the borderless nature of the 21st Century world, the infection had spread across practically the entire globe in less than 24 hours, long before the first active infections were correctly identified and the shocked authorities realised what it was they were dealing with.

In less than 14 days, only a few, isolated island nations like New Zealand and Iceland were Infection-free. Human civilisation was already tumbling into ruin with the Infected outnumbering the clean in most population centres by four to one; governments were rapidly liquefying as their various agencies collapsed due to the Infection wiping out their personnel.

In less than two years, no place on Earth was untouched with all surviving governments reduced to military dictatorships with only limited control over their supposed territories.

In only five years, the old world was gone with the final tatters of the old order desperately clinging onto widely-dispersed clean zones with the world outside them long since lost to blood-splattered anarchy. Even in those clean zones, insurgent groups like the Fireflies were on the rise, accusing the military authorities of overreach of their legal authority and dereliction of their duties whilst claiming to know the way to restore the old world. Outside the QZs, in the wild, only the law of the jungle remained. Survival of the strongest and most ruthless; kill or be killed; take whatever you can and devil take the hindmost.

Twenty years later, in the year 2033, the world in which Joel grew up was a fading memory and, in his opinion, even the miraculous cure of CBI would not bring it back.

"Got a live one here!"

"Put her on the floor."

Joel's eyes snapped back to the raid on the run-down tenement building when he heard these words. An African-American woman was laying face-down on the floor and struggling with the soldier holding her down with a boot on the back of her neck, wailing in terror as the officer walked over, brandishing a hypodermic syringe. "God, no! I'm not Infected! I'm not…" Without a pause or even any real indication that he cared about the woman's protests, the man knelt beside the prostrate woman and inserted the syringe into one of her jugular veins and pumped in a lethal dose of barbiturates.

"Shit, man!" one of the already-scanned detainees moaned.

"Shut up! Eyes forward!" growled one of the soldiers briefly pointing his M4 assault rifle at the back of his head.

The soldiers stood back as the woman began to shriek even louder, thrashing about as the chemicals shut down her nervous system. FEDRA insisted that this was 'euthanasia' and was a merciful, humane and painless end compared with what CBI would do to you. Joel had seen the process plenty of times and, from the victims' reactions, it certainly seemed that it was plenty painful to him. He figured that he'd prefer a well-aimed bullet or two and that the only reason for this way of doing things was to conserve ammunition.

"She's down. Move on."

Not even bothering to look at the woman, who had finally fallen still with a final, agonised, rattling breath, the soldiers stepped over to the last detainee, a young blond man. "FUCK THIS!" With a sudden motion, the man slapped the scanner out of the soldier's hand and was on his feet, running. He vaulted the barriers just in time to receive a burst of fire from both NBC-suited soldiers' assault rifles. The two soldiers walked over to the man and checked to confirm he was dead (not that, realistically, there was anything else for him to be).

Yeah, on the whole, Joel would prefer a bullet.

The officer put his hand to his helmet as he activated his radio. "Sector Control, Squad One-Four-Papa: Op complete. Two for detention, two for disposal."

"Fuck man! This sucks!" groaned one of the two surviving detainees, the one who had offered some small protest at the woman's passionless execution. "Should 'a stayed outside!"

"Shut the fuck up," snapped one of the soldiers. "It's your own fuckin' fault for squatting in a condemned building!"

One of the soldiers guarding the perimeter gestured at Joel, his face unfriendly and his eyes clearly watching for the slightest excuse to fire. "Move on pal; this isn't a show!"

"That it ain't," Joel agreed.

Tess had been loitering slightly further away although she hadn't been able to tear her eyes away from this everyday macabre drama of the Boston QZ either. "Seems to me that every day more people are getting Infected," she murmured as she turned back to the checkpoint to the sector where Robert was, hiding, according to her information.

Joel scowled. "That just means more people are sneaking Outside and then getting back in." It was just another sign that the QZ's days were numbered, as far as Joel's was concerned. He started wondering how hard it would be to convince Tess to move on to one of the more secure QZs in the Detroit/Windsor or Toronto areas or out on the West Coast. Joel figured it would be hard; Boston was her home, after all.

As the two smugglers walked on, they passed another pair of gossipers, a man and a woman, these ones within sight of Checkpoint Five, the gateway to the industrial sector where Robert had, according to Tess, set up his base of operations. Well aware that keeping up with news was a survival necessity, Joel wandered over to listen in. The two gossipers noticed him at once. "S' up Joel?" the man asked.

Joel nodded to the man, an acquaintance like most of the residents of the QZ who lived in this sector. "Nothin'," was Joel's noncommittal response.

"You hear they took Marianne?"

The name didn't mean much to Joel; hell, he wasn't sure that he remembered this guy's name. Avoiding getting too close with most folk was one of those things a man learnt to save himself from too much anguish if they get themselves killed.

"What happened?" asked the woman, saving Joel the trouble of prompting the guy to keep talking.

"Snatched her in the middle of the night; said she was a Firefly! Can you believe this shit?"

"Better not mention the Fireflies too loudly!" The woman shot a significant glance at the checkpoint and the troops, some on foot and some clustered around an armed HMMWV, who were scanning the buildings around them with a mix of open hostility and fear.

The man looked too and Joel watched the resentment and fear cross his face. "… Yeah, I guess you're right."

There's another guy who'll snatch up a gun when the Fireflies finally make their move, Joel thought to himself. "Gotta get going; keep your heads down, you hear?" he added aloud.

"Hey, come on, Texas!" Tess yelled. Joel nodded a polite farewell and moved off to join her. He refrained from jogging or doing anything else that might draw attention to him because the soldiers standing by the armed HMMWV that had just pulled up by the checkpoint were talking about how several of their compatriots had been massacred (apparently by the Fireflies as a 'reprisal') and what they would do to any 'stragglers' (i.e., anyone they felt was a danger to them) that looked at them wrong today.

Tess clearly felt the fear-drenched threat in the air too. She kept looking towards the two soldiers standing next to the HMMWV, who were still talking darkly about what would happen to FEDRA personnel in Boston if they lost control of the 'stragglers' and how they intended to avoid that grizzly fate. As the two smugglers passed each other, Tess slid a card-covered document into Joel's hand. "I got us all-new papers," she murmured. "Just play it cool and everything should be fine."

With a casual bravura that they didn't really feel, Joel and Tess walked down the line of concrete lane dividers to the pedestrian gate of the checkpoint. They halted as a slightly-unshaven and tired-looking guard held up a hand in a gesture to stop. "Let me see your IDs," the man said, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the four-axle truck that was passing through the vehicle gate right next to them. The guard glared at the IDs but Tess's pet forger had proven their value again; he couldn't see anything wrong with the forged IDs. "What's your business here?"

Joel responded. "It's our day off. We're going to see a friend in Area 5."

The soldier frowned at the two civilians but had to admit that it all seemed legit. The well-built bearded man and the woman with the preoccupied frown didn't seem dangerous or even significant. They didn't have anything in which they could be smuggling anything and they didn't look anything like any of the known Firefly agitators and terrorists whose mug-shots they had to memorise every damn time they went out of the barracks. Finally, he mentally shrugged. "Okay, this is in order; pass on through."

"Thank you kindly," Joel replied without even a splinter of irony, stepping towards the gate through the concrete archway of the checkpoint.

Looking back, Joel would work out what happened next. The four-axle truck had left the checkpoint and driven over a manhole cover which had suddenly erupted upwards like a huge armour-piercing bullet; someone had placed an explosive charge under the cover. The improvised projectile had torn through the truck's guts and its fuel tanks had blown up instantly, sending high-speed shrapnel flashing across the area of Checkpoint Five.

At the time, all Joel could understand was that he was suddenly lying on his back in a filthy puddle that had collected in the ill-maintained asphalt leading up to the checkpoint; his head was ringing like a bell and his right arm was throbbing due to the long, shallow cut that had suddenly opened up between his wrist and elbow. Tess was tugging on his left arm, trying to drag him to his feet as the guards hurriedly shut the checkpoint gates, screaming instructions at each other, at Tess and at anybody. As the ringing in Joel's head subsided, he could hear the crackle of the soldiers' assault rifles, the similar answering sound of the attackers' full-auto rifles and the occasional sharp 'crack' of a hunting rifle.

"Joel, come on! Let's get outta here! Let's go! C'mon! Go! Go!" Tess took to her heels as her partner dragged himself to his feet and staggered off in her wake.

"Goddamn Fireflies! Shoot 'em!" screamed someone as, with a deep-throated rhythmic thunder, the big fifty-calibre on the HMMWV joined in the party.

"Attention. Checkpoint 5 is now closed until further notice. All civilians must clear the surrounding area immediately." The pre-recorded PA announcement cycled continually over the ringing of bells and scream of sirens.

As he ran for safety, he noticed with grim amusement of a torn and faded banner hung across the front of a building opposite the Checkpoint: 'FEDRA Welcomes You to the Boston Safe Zone'. Safe zone, my ass!

Joel staggered into an apartment building further along the opposite side of the road from the Checkpoint (ironically the one just next to where Joel had encountered the two people complaining about a friend being arrested on suspicion of being a Firefly). Tess was there, bent over, hands on her knees and breathing deeply. "So… So much for the easy route!" she gasped. "Anyone following us?"

Joel looked over his shoulder through the dirty and cracked glass of the building's main door. Several military vehicles were pulling up next to the checkpoint and more soldiers were pouring out and racing into the battle that had suddenly flared up in the middle of the QZ. "Nope; looks like the coast is clear."

Tess nodded. Then she seemed to notice Joel's injury for the first time and grimaced. "Okay, you need to patch yourself up before we do anything else!" She gave Joel a small paper package that, when torn open, revealed alcohol-soaked rags that was the closest thing to a first-aid kit in the QZ (unless you were FEDRA, of course). Joel hissed slightly as he ran the infection-killing alcohol along his cut, placed one of the rags along its length to soak up blood and wrapped more of the rags around his arm.

"They're going to close up all the checkpoints after this," Tess predicted. "The only way through to Area 5 now is going to be to go outside."

"Outside the wall?"

Tess shot Joel a challenging look, an eyebrow raised mockingly and a smirk touching her lips. "Or we could just let Robert go after stealing our shit and trying to have me whacked."

Joel smirked back. "Oh, that's cute."

Joel hauled himself upright and set off in Tess's wake down the half-lit corridor of the apartment building.

As they walked down the corridor, past too many doors sealed by FEDRA for containing Infected materials and past tired, dispirited-looking folk, they came across a familiar face; a fellow smuggler. "Hey Tess, Joel! You see that shit?"

Tess snorted. "We were in the middle of it. How's the East Tunnel looking?"

"It's clear; I just used it myself. No patrols in the open areas. Where you headed?"

"Gonna pay Robert a little visit."

The other smuggler raised an eyebrow at Tess. "You too?"

Joel didn't like that sound of that. "Who else is looking for everyone's favourite black marketer?"

"Uh… Marlene herself! She's been asking around personally, trying to find him!"

"Marlene!" Joel was genuinely surprised to hear that familiar name. "What do the Fireflies want with Robert?"

"Heh! You think she'd tell me anything?" Seeing the concerned look on Tess's face, the other smuggler continued. "Look, I told her the truth; no clue where that little rat in human form's been hiding out lately!"

"Good." Tess shook her head. "Look, you keep your head down, okay? It looks like it's gonna be a hot evening and I'll bet the military ain't gonna be too fussy about checking their targets."

The man nodded. "Yeah, I hear that. See ya around, Tess, Joel."

The man slowed to a halt and leant casually against the wall, clearly content to wait out the day. Tess turned to look at Joel. "What do you think about that?"

"I don't like it. The top Firefly in Boston, maybe the top Firefly period, is looking for our boy? Robert's been treading on too many toes lately; I figure we need to find him before the Fireflies do!"

The two reached the end of the long hallway and entered what must have once been a beautiful apartment with an 'L' shaped main room looking through windows over what had once been a park but was now an overgrown mess.

An elderly African-American man who'd likely been living here all his life, since long before the Outbreak and the Quarantine Zone, looked up as the two smugglers strode in. Joel noticed him tuck the grip of a double-barrel sawn-off shotgun back into a hollow in the moth-eaten couch on which he was sitting, reading a thick book. "Theresa; Joel; it's always a pleasure. How's it going?"

"All sorts of shit stirring up today!" Tess shook her head. "The only way from one side of the Zone to the other is the unofficial way. How's the tunnel looking?"

"It's clear. No military and no Infected." The man gestured at his book-case with an untroubled expression. There were more people involved in the black economy than most could imagine. Even people who were quite happy for their homes to be turned into one end of a secret smuggling tunnel, so long as they got a cut or (as in this guy's case) it 'stuck it to the man'.

Tess and Joel shoved the book-case aside and dropped into the hole thus exposed that led into the building's basement.

Joel shouldn't have been surprised but he still grimaced when, instead of the 'thud' of boots meeting concrete, the sound he heard as he landed at the bottom of the shaft leading in between the walls of the building was a 'squelch'.

"Jesus! What a reek!" Tess complained. "People should be more careful about what they drop down here!" Joel didn't see the need to reply, instead focussing on getting his bearings in the dimness of the light filtering down from the entrance way above. There was a shuffling as Tess moved; here night vision had always been better than Joel's. "Let there be light!" Tess flipped a switch and work lights strung around the officially long-sealed-off basement flashed to life, powered by a gas-fuelled generator of the sort that was quite illegal to be in private ownership. Of course, the smugglers of Boston had little time for such rules. Above, the 'gatekeeper', as Joel thought of him, responding to Tess's deliberately over-loud call, slid the bookcase back over the entrance to the tunnel.

Tess nodded in the appropriate direction. "C'mon, let's get our stuff."

Joel followed Tess down a short tunnel cut through the basements of various buildings here at the edge of the Quarantine Zone. This was an old, old smugglers' route and showed it. As well as the lighting, there were well-installed structural supports (Joel had used his building experience to erect some of those). At the far end of the tunnel was a well-equipped staging area with shelving racks, lockers and work-benches.

It was sort of strange that with so many criminal types coming through here, no-one had any problem leaving their stuff. The thing was that the various elements of the black market and underworld of the Boston QZ had a sort of honour system going. No-one screwed each other over casually. No-one took someone else's stuff. That was why Robert's actions had immediately earned him a big and possibly-fatal black mark. If you couldn't trust your business partners anymore, then doing business was that much harder. Naturally, just about anyone could turn out to be your next customer or supplier, so only an idiot would casually betray anyone.

Tess opened the locker that she and Joel used and pulled out their kit they kept for travelling beyond the walls in this sector.

Joel picked up his Colt Defender-8000 (the nine-millimetre version of the venerable M1911 forty-five semi-auto), pulled out the clip and worked the action a few times. It was still in working order. Joel tried hard to maintain his equipment, even though appropriate tools and materials were increasingly difficult to obtain. He wasn't about to lose his two decade war of survival just because his gun chose to blow up rather than shoot.

He glared at the clip; only four rounds left. "Runnin' real low ammo," he remarked.

"Better make every shot count," Tess responded as she stuck her Walther P5 in her waistband at her back.

Joel re-loaded his gun and stuck it in his waistband before tucking his gas mask (a modern survival necessity) into his backpack and sliding it onto his back. He then attached his torch to one of the straps of his pack so he could keep both hands free in the dark.

The two smugglers, now equipped for work, walked to the exit from the preparation/storage area. It was an elevated area, right underneath the floor of the building containing the exit. No-one was stupid enough to actually have a ladder there; the whole place had been designed so that, with the lights off, it would just look like an abandoned basement extending underneath the perimeter wall.

Although Tess was hardly a lightweight, Joel's strength was enough to easily boost the woman up onto the raised platform. It was a testimony to her own strength that she could haul the heavily-built man up after her.

To be continued...