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

Chapter 2 – The Ruins of Before

The exit of the East Tunnel was through the floor of a long-since abandoned diner lying just outside the wall of the QZ.

Joel always found being in these areas a strange experience. The final evacuation of the area outside the Quarantine Zone was so sudden that very little was taken by their legitimate owners. Being so close to the walls made looting a risky prospect at best and, at the time the QZs were founded in the first two years after the Outbreak, hopes were still high that the scientists would quickly cure the CBI. People had honestly thought that they'd be going back to their lives. So, despite the generally-dilapidated feel (every window broken and every door hanging off their hinges) the interior of the diner was strangely neat and tidy. Every table still had condiment bottles and napkin holders neatly laid out on mostly-intact tables in largely intact booths. The soda dispenser still stood on the counter and empty but largely-intact drinks cabinets stood against the walls. Only a breach in the wall to the left, possibly caused by some explosive weapon in the hurried final clearance of the area outside of the QZ, broke the eerie feel of a ghost town.

Tess was striding confidently towards the doors whilst Joel re-settled the cobbled-together wooden cover to the top of the tunnel. "Be careful!" he called out.

"When am I not?"

Joel couldn't help a smile. "Is that a trick question?"

As for outside…? Well, Tess put it best: "Ain't been out here in a while!"

Joel looked around the space that had once been a fairly typical part of Boston, one of the most typical cities in the continental United States and felt a sudden unsettling surge of dislocation. What had once been a street with two rows of buildings was suddenly more like a canyon in a jungle. Everything was overgrown. A few abandoned cars, long since rusted into skeletal shapes, marked what had once been the location of sidewalks. Power and light poles stood in places, others having long since heeled over like dead trees. Vines, thick bushes and young trees grew everywhere, consuming the works of Man. Most of the centre of the road had long since been swept away by the out-flow from a shattered water main that had flooded up through the road surface before its supply had been cut off. Years of rains and erosion and swept away the remaining black-top, leaving a watery shallow crater that was rapidly turning into a swampy lake. The call of frogs and the buzz of flying insects filled the air.

This was no longer a city. It was now the Wilds; no more friendly to the presence of humanity than any other wild place. With a sudden melancholy, Joel wondered how long it would be before it was impossible to tell that this place had ever been an urban street rather than a quiet pond in the woods.

Tess was perhaps feeling the silence as much as Joel was. "Y'know, being out here with you feels kinda special. It's almost as if we're on a date or something!"

Joel chuckled. "Well, I am the romantic type," he responded, earning a warm smile from his partner.

"Oh… you got your ways!"

The two smugglers sloshed through the knee-deep water to the other side of the road – a residential building over commercial premises once, now a crumbling ruin with gaping holes caused by more heavy weapons fire from the worst of the post-Outbreak anarchy.

One particular wall was suspiciously clear of growth. Tess looked around in annoyance. "Where's the ladder?"

"Last guy comin' through probably hid it in case a patrol came this way. It's gotta be around here somewhere." Joel turned away from the wall and began to walk along the row of decaying buildings, searching for the tell-tale glint of maintained metal amidst the hip-high grasses, saplings and the omnipresent colour of rusting metal. Seeing his objective, Joel leant down and lifted the ladder up into a carry that he used many a time on a construction site in his youth. "Got it!"

Tess stepped back as Joel manoeuvred the ladder in place, on the wall under the breach so they could access the second storey of the building. He then stepped back and gestured courteously. "Ladies first!"

Tess agilely scaled the ladder but couldn't help but make a comment. "Lady? You must be thinking of someone else!"

This earned a chuckle from both smugglers. "It's all relative," Joel remarked. Although he never saw it, this made Tess smile and blush ever so slightly.

Once inside the former luxury apartment, Joel decided to take a look around. Just because everything obviously usable would long ago have been stripped from somewhere that was so obviously a smugglers' thoroughfare didn't mean that something would have been missed and Joel was the sort of guy who would take resources to improve his odds wherever he could find them. The main room was once a luxurious lounge centred on a pool table. Through the door was the kitchen and dining room. In the kitchen drawers, he found some spare parts that looked like he could use for maintenance purposes and a pair of kitchen scissors.

"Someone's definitely been using this place," Tess said, agreeing with Joel's unspoken words. Joel went into what was once the bedroom and, very obviously, was again. There were six metal-framed bunk-beds around the room and the walls were decorated by the familiar 'dragonfly' logo of the Firefly organisation. Tess hissed in annoyance. If the Fireflies had set up a base on the East Tunnel route, then getting to and from Area Five without attracting official attention would be a lot harder in the future.

Joel frowned and looked around the well-arranged barracks room as Tess turned over mattresses and boxes in the hope of finding useful stuff. "Looks like they turned this place into a safe-house but it don't look like they've been around for a while though," Joel remarked. He walked over to a small corner table and found something. "Yep, I don't think that they'll be coming back." The item Joel had found was a Firefly ID pendent in the name of 'David Michael Vigil'. No living Firefly ever took off their pendent; it was a sort of statement of faith. Obviously, this one had been removed from a dead member of the group by his buddies but, if they had never intended to come back to this place, they would have taken it with them in the hope that, one day, they could tell his family that he had died for 'the good fight'.

"Either the Military got 'em or the Infected got 'em," Tess concluded. "There's nothing else here, let's go."

Joel and Tess toggled their flashlights on after jumping down to the ground level of the building (they had to jump – the bottom half of the stairs had long since collapsed into a mass of rot). This corridor, as well as containing the long sealed-off street entrance to the apartment, also had an entrance to an industrial laundry that took up the building's bottom and basement levels. Nothing down here worked anymore, of course. Joel wasn't even slightly surprised to see bedding and empty supply boxes that suggested that someone had been squatting down here not that long ago.

"Do you reckon Robert's still got our guns?" Tess asked idly.

Joel scowled. "For his sake, he'd better."

Tess shook her head at Joel's implied pessimism. "Look, once we get the merchandise back, it'll be easy to offload."

Joel only needed a single look around the mess to decide that there was nothing worth his time here. "Speaking of merchandise, when is our next shipment due anyway?" After all, there was a good chance that Robert had already sold on his stolen cargo and a businessman had to look ahead, not dream of the deal lost in the past.

Tess set off down the corridor to the rear of the building. "Well, we're supposed to be meeting Bill at the end of the month. More pills and lots of ammo… supposedly… Wait… shit!" The woman froze at where the corridor turned into the bays where the laundry machines still sat, rusting away. "Hold up! Spores!"

Joel looked around the corner and bit off a furious curse of his own. The corridor was filled with a dancing miasma of softly-luminescent golden dust. Cordyceps spores: absolute guarantor of a living death to anyone luckless enough to breathe them in. Joel and Tess hurriedly fumbled on their gas masks and took a moment to check the seals before cautiously setting off down the corridor. "Where the hell have these come from?" Joel complained. "Place was clear the last time!"

"Well, they're coming from somewhere! Stay alert!"

As they entered the room with the laundry machines, the two smugglers were frantically sweeping around them with their flashlights, looking for any sign of movement and any sign of the source of the spores. Wherever it was, it was blocking a primary smuggling route. There were others but it was one of those elements of the honour system in the Boston QZ's black economy that anyone who found a spore-generating infection cleared it away themselves as soon as they could or at least spread the word so someone else could.

Nothing here; the two entered into the short tunnel dug through the wall of the abandoned laundry into a former commercial office that was the next step in the path to Area Five. Joel saw it first. "There's our culprit."

At the mouth of the tunnel a man lay crumpled on the pile of bricks that had been torn from the wall long ago to create the smuggling tunnel. Grotesquely, shining pink fingers of fresh Cordyceps sporocarps - fruiting bodies - were growing from his shoulders and face. It was unusual to see a first-stage Infected having turned into a spore generator like this. Joel guessed that the general lack of prey in this abandoned part of Boston meant that Infected settled down to make spores a lot faster than they would normally.

"Bodies aren't that old," Tess noted. "They've barely just settled down. We'd better keep our eyes and ears open. Whatever infected them may still be around!"

Joel's brow wrinkled at the plural tense before he saw what Tess had seen. Crumpled in the far corner was a female corpse with sporocarps sprouting from her chest. The wall behind her was marked with the large reddish blood splash-like stain of Cordyceps hyphae threads spreading out to create more areas for the sporocarps to grow. Joel wondered if, maybe, these were the squatters who had been living in the laundry.

In the far corner of the small store-room was the door out into the main office area, now blocked with some wood and a partly toppled filing cabinet. Joel considered the blockage for a moment. "Hold on, I think we can squeeze through…" Joel shifted one bit of timber and, too late, realised that it was practically the only thing holding together the entire blockage. Bits of plaster wood and concrete tumbled from the ceiling as the big man backpedalled from the cave-in. "SHIT!"

"Are you okay? Is your mask still good?" Joel understood her worry. One breath of the spores would be enough to snuff out his humanity like it was a flickering candle in as little as 48 hours.

"No, I'm fine. Watch yourself though; fuckin' ceiling's coming apart. Doubt we'll be able to use this route much longer!" Joel noted that at least the doorway was now clear. "Okay, take it easy but I think we can get through there."

As Joel slid through the narrow opening into the office area proper, he realised, with a sudden spike of horror that something was touching his ankle. Reacting on an instinct that he didn't care to analyse, he grabbed Tess by the shoulders and practically flung her out of the doorway and clear of the figure on the ground that had tried to grab him. He stepped back a bit from the figure, who was coughing desperately despite his gas mask.

"H… Help me!" the guy pleaded.

Joel looked dispassionately at the scene. The cave-in that had blocked the doorway had clearly affected this room too. A filing cabinet had been knocked over by falling debris and had trapped the man underneath its weight. "Don't think there's much I can do for you, brother," he gravelled. Even if he and Tess were inclined, he doubted that they could move the fallen rubble, timber and the filing cabinet in anything less than hours and he wasn't keen to stay in the spore-filled rooms longer than strictly necessary. Even then, the guy was probably so badly injured that he would have to be carried out of the building, something that Joel wasn't keen to try, especially as there were almost certainly Infected denizens in here.

"M… My mask broke," the man gasped. Joel looked at the panic-stricken eyes behind the gas mask's eye plates. "For God's sake, do what you have to but don't leave me to turn… please!"

Tess audibly swallowed in horror. Turning whilst trapped and without the means to even end it; for everyone who had thought about it, this was a nightmare. "What do we do?" she murmured, suddenly sounding a lot younger than her thirty-or-so years.

Joel circled warily around the man. In the corner he found what was almost certainly the unfortunate guy's gun. A nine-millimetre pistol of some sort; looked like a Beretta-92. Almost automatically, Joel pulled out the clip, slid out the two remaining bullets within and fed them into his gun's magazine. "For God's sake, you can't leave me here!" the man choked out.

A part of Joel, a merciless part of him, told him that this wasn't his problem and that he had little enough ammo for his gun to be wasting it on someone who was already dead. Another part of him, a part that he rarely listened to, asked him how he would feel if the situation was reversed. Hadn't he always promised himself to eat a bullet before he could turn?

Joel dropped the empty pistol and walked back to the man, sliding the magazine into his gun and racking the slide to load the first round into the chamber. "Sucks to be you, friend," he said gently, raising his Colt and centring it on the man's head, taking a braced pose to maximise his accuracy.

"Thank you…" the guy gasped out before Joel squeezed the trigger, blowing a hole through his head and much of his brains out the other side. The noise was nearly deafening in the enclosed space and would likely bring anything with more than a few working brain cells running but neither living smuggler cared for the moment.

"Poor bastard…" Tess muttered in horror. Joel just turned away. There was nothing left to be said or done. A quick sweep around the office area found nothing of significance except two large hyphae stains on the corner of the wall and ceiling above two long-abandoned cubicles that indicated that, a long time ago, there had been spore-generators here.

Joel led Tess through a partly-boarded up doorway into a corridor with two doors leading out into the main area of the office and the exit back out of the building. Suddenly, there was a sound of shouting and screeches that were once human. Both smugglers dropped into crouches. "Hear that?" Tess whispered sharply.

Joel gestured for silence and pressed himself against the wall by the first door, straining his ears. What he heard was someone shouting desperately for aid, his shouts suddenly turning into a horrendous, liquid-sounding scream accompanied by the shrieks of triumph from the throats of at least two Infected.

Finally, the noise faded (apart from the nightmare-inducing sound of flesh being torn apart). Joel could hear the noise of an Infected in just the next room, gasping and muttering inanities to itself. It was a Runner, the first stage of Infection.

Runners were nearly indistinguishable from a human. However, you couldn't miss their spastic, twitching movements and their continual muttering to themselves, usually repeating over and over again the last human thought that crossed the communication centre of their brain before the CBI took control of their bodies, leaving them helpless prisoners, locked into an unending hell. Another way that you could tell a Runner was by their eyes: their eyes were covered in a thin layer of Cordyceps mycellum that gave them a blind look and shone in the dark with the characteristic golden-white bioluminescence of the fungus.

This one was now standing in the centre of a small room, possibly a former office of some sort, clawing at its face and muttering words to itself that had no meaning to anyone or anything except to the person that had once owned this body. Someone who, if there was even the slightest sliver of mercy in the universe (something Joel doubted) had slipped into the oblivion of insanity long ago and wasn't aware of what the parasite was doing with his body.

"How do you want to handle this?" Tess whispered. "Do y'think we can slip past them unnoticed?"

Joel didn't bother with a reply. Carefully, measuring each step to ensure it would not make a sound, he crept up behind the Runner. He sneaked closer and closer until he was within touching distance. Then he shot up to his full height and wrapped his strong arms around the creature's neck, yanking it backwards off of its feet. With the ease of long practice, his right hand stabbed forward, finding the Runner's windpipe and pinching it closed in a vice-like grip, cutting off its cry of furious surprise before it was uttered. For five long seconds, the Runner thrashed helplessly, trying to get some purchase on its attacker before its movements slowed and finally stopped, the creature going slack in Joel's arms.

The big man quietly and gently lowered the corpse to the floor, not out of any particular reverence for the dead but because he didn't want to attract the other Runners, at least two of them in the next room, by making a noise. Runners' eyesight wasn't too good; for some reason Cordyceps couldn't properly interpret the signals from the visual cortex, if it could at all. Hearing though, worked fine. Indeed it was better than that of an average uninfected human, so the slightest noise would certainly attract them.

Still moving quietly Joel edged out into the main room of the office, as filled with spores as the rest. On the other side of the room was the stairwell up to the upper storey of the building and the exit from this part of the smuggling route. However before they could get there, there was the issue of the two Runners on the far side of the room feasting ravenously on the body of the guy they'd caught just a minute or so before.

Joel swallowed his nausea; puking in his mask was a death sentence. Keeping an eye on the two Infected, he and Tess slowly side-stepped towards the stairs. Joel didn't know what he trod on, in the end it didn't matter. What mattered was the sudden crack that cut through the sounds of cannibalistic frenzy. Both Runners reacted instantly, their heads snapping upwards and turning towards the noise.

Joel didn't hesitate. His Colt was already out and, as the female Runner staggered to its feet, he aimed his gun between the shining yellow beacons of its eyes and squeezed the trigger. There was a deafening report and the Runner tumbled backwards, blood marked with bioluminescent points fountaining out the back of its head.

The other, a male, was already charging the two smugglers with a wailing shriek as Joel shifted his aim. Tess's Walther fired twice, staggering the creature. Her third shot coincided with Joel's next and the Runner crumpled lifelessly in a heap.

Joel triggered his flashlight and swept the room. The echoes of the gunfire were dying away and there was no sign and no sound of further movement. "I think that was all of them," Tess remarked.

"Let's hope so," Joel growled. The windfall of that luckless guy's ammo was all used up and another shot besides. Sometimes, Joel thought that the world was laughing at him and his.

Not having any desire to be jumped from behind, Joel strode across the space into what looked like the canteen. His flashlight's beam picked out something at once – a FEDRA-standard ration bar. It looked like a candy bar or maybe a cereal bar but it was as good as a meal; tasteless but beggars couldn't be choosers. It went into Joel's pack.

The door to a small rest area beside the kitchen was unlocked. Joel pulled it open and was grateful for his thoroughness because a damaged 9mm pistol with three rounds in its magazine was sitting on a small table in a pool of light from a dirty window looking like a divine gift.

He figured that the Runners' lunch had been hiding in this room, waiting for the Runners to move away from the door so he could get out. When he had heard the shot of Joel's mercy killing he'd moved but moved too early and the Runners had brought him down. Perhaps Joel should have felt guilty about being indirectly responsible for the man's death but he didn't even think about it. You were smart or you were dead in this world. Sometimes, you got to be both if your luck ran out.

Joel walked back out and joined Tess climbing up the stairs to the upper level. A gaping hole led out into the open air and the spores were thinner here, most escaping through the hole and dispersing harmlessly. Joel decided to check what, once, was the office of the manager of the organisation.

Here, along with another FEDRA ration bar and a few lukewarm bottles of water, he found a depressing story. The Runners were once a small group people trying to sneak into the Zone from outside but who had got themselves infected. The two guys from whom Joel had acquired some ammo were pretty obviously the smugglers whom they had hired to sneak them in. On an impulse, Joel took the note that explained the story. He couldn't honestly say why. Maybe, just maybe, he intended to ask around the smuggler grapevine, see if someone knew who Mark's brother was and pass them his last message. Knowing was always better than spending the rest of your life wondering.

"Joel, we need to get back into the city," Tess remarked. Joel wordlessly passed her the note as he walked towards the hole in the outer wall. Tess made a sympathetic noise. "As much as everyone bitches about life in the Zone, you've got all these poor bastards outside, wishing that they were living on the inside!"

Joel and Tess jumped down from the breach into a semi-flooded alleyway that led out onto a street in what had once been an industrial/commercial zone before it was abandoned to become another part of the Wilds. Both smugglers pulled off their gas masks and Tess flipped her hair in a way that made a part of Joel that he didn't often admit to react. "Ah! Some fresh air!" she sighed. "That's the one think I love about the outside: I fucking hate the smell of the city!"

They crossed the street… well, waded through what had become a river of rain-water that had collected in the ruined buildings and funnelled by the shape of the roadway into a slow-moving flow of water down to the sea. "Well, why don't you ask Bill for one of them pine air fresheners in the next shipment?" Joel mocked semi-seriously.

"I might," Tess responded. "If they weren't all expired, it might even be a good idea!"

The last part of the route involved passing through a warehouse that had long-since collapsed into a hollowed out shell. The presence of a sheaf of FEDRA wanted posters (mostly a "who's who" of the Fireflies in Boston) and the fact that the plank leading across the gaping hole that had once been the floor of the second storey had been removed indicated that whoever had been removing parts of the route might have been either Military or trying to lose Military pursuit. Based on the recently-abandoned sleeping squat in the shade under the remains of the upper storey and the ID pendant of one Ben Glueck, Firefly no. 000106, hanging from a tree near the fire escape from the warehouse suggested to Joel that it might be the latter. There were lots of indications that the Fireflies had a serious presence in the East Tunnel smuggling route and that they had recently abandoned it in a hurry.

Joel and Tess walked through a surprisingly new-looking metal door into what had once been a small jeweller's store. Surprising until you realised that it was the passage through the wall back into the Quarantine Zone. Tess strode towards the door out into the Zone. "Joel, we're gonna need some extra power if Robert has lots of muscle; get some stuff from the box."

Joel backtracked into the small kitchen area where they had entered. Like most abandoned areas close to the Zone, it had long since been stripped clean. That's why no-one had found the crude false back that Joel had installed in the cabinet over the sink (which had lost it door so long ago that there was no real evidence it had ever had one). Inside, the wooden box, which had once contained chess pieces, was sitting completely undisturbed. Joel flipped it open, moved aside some yellowed grease-proof paper and pulled out some extra tools he and Tess had stashed here just in case a few trips ago. As well as loaded magazines for Joel's Colt and Tess's Walther, there were also two empty magazines and a nearly-empty box of 9mm ammo. Joel also pulled out a nicely finished, sharpened and reinforced shiv that he'd crafted. Guns weren't the only way to make a killing in the Zone; they weren't even the best way.

Back in the shopfront room, Joel silently handed Tess the ammo and, as she fed three extra rounds into her empty spare clip, he tucked his shiv away into a belt loop-like sheath he had attached to the back of his jeans.

Tess banged on the front door of the former jewellers' shop and waited until a ragged-looking little boy – 10 years old at most – answered it. "Hello, little man!" Tess offered the boy a ration card and then snatched it back at the last moment. "Check to make sure the coast is clear. No soldiers; none of Robert's men, got it?" The boy nodded eagerly and Tess handed over the card.

As they waited, Joel finally gave vent to something that had been chasing itself around his head ever since they set out. "You know he's expecting us?"

Tess grinned in a feral way that reminded Joel again just how amazingly dangerous a woman she was. "Well, that'll just make it more interesting!"

There was a double knock on the door and, through a window, Joel saw the little boy striding away nonchalantly. A sign of the times: a pre-teen who was utterly at ease aiding a pair of desperate armed criminals. "Good to go!" Tess remarked, opening the door again.

To be continued…