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 4 – The Cargo

Marlene Stack, leader of Boston's cell of the Fireflies, indeed possibly (or so scuttlebutt said) the supreme leader of the insurgent movement that had sworn to cure the CBI and overthrow FEDRA, leant against the wall of the alleyway. Under her dark skin tone, she was pale. She'd clearly been in a fight and was not on top of her game. Yet, despite being alone, wounded, outnumbered and outgunned, there was something about her that simply controlled the alleyway and left Tess and Joel feeling a strange sense that it was they who were at the terrorist's mercy rather than vice-versa. Marlene glared at them before snapping out a question. "What are you two gun-runners doing in this part of town? This isn't your normal haunt!"

Tess shrugged; guarded in the face of a very, very dangerous woman. "Business," she said elliptically. "You don't look so hot over there."

Marlene ignored the implied question in Tess's statement. "Where's Robert?"

Tess smirked and gestured to the bloodied corpse behind her. Marlene sighed in a disappointed way, as if confronting the harmless mess created by a particularly retarded kindergartener rather than the remains of a man who had just been tortured and executed. "I needed him alive, Tess. I had a use for him."

Tess hid her wince at the thought of having inadvertently become a setback to Marlene's plans. Instead, she decided to try to take charge of the conversation. "Marlene, I've got some bad news for you. The guns he sold you recently? They weren't his to sell. I want them back."

Marlene's smile was slightly patronising as she shook her head like a mother confronting a cute but spoilt child. "Ah, Theresa! Now, you know things don't work like that."

"The hell it don't!" Tess responded, vibrating with outrage.

"You see… I don't give a shit that Robert sold me a cargo that belonged to someone else. I paid, up front and in good faith." Tess was about to reply but Marlene casually raised a hand to silence her. "I'm not an unreasonable woman, Tess. I'm willing to do business with you but, if you want those weapons, then I need something from you to cover my costs."

Tess sagged slightly. Here it comes, she thought. She just hoped that Marlene's idea of a 'fair price' wasn't more than what the cargo could fetch on the market. "Okay, how many cards are we talkin' here?"

Marlene laughed mockingly. "Oh, Theresa! My counterfeiters can print me as many cards as I want when I want them! No, I need a very special service carried out that requires someone with… a special skill-set. I need something smuggled out of the Quarantine Zone. You do that for me… and you'll get your cargo back. You'll get it and interest accrued."

Joel stepped forward as Tess considered that offer. "The way I hear it, the military have practically wiped you guys out in this town. So… how do we know that this payment still exists?"

Marlene suddenly lost a bit of her shine as she looked inward, maybe thinking of comrades-in-arms who had died in recent fights. "I can't deny that," she admitted at last. "Look, I will show you the payment before I hand over the cargo."

Suddenly a voice echoed from the warehouse Joel and Tess had passed through just minutes earlier. "Spread out! There are only so many ways out of this area that the outlaws could have taken!"

"Yes sir! Green team, take the first storeroom! Blue team the second!"

"Sir yes sir!"

"Sounds like the military is taking an interest in your handiwork too!" Marlene said, suddenly appearing alert and fearful. "I gotta move. People, this is a one-time offer: what will it be?"

Tess and Joel exchanged a wordless glance, both knowing instantly what the other was thinking. "I want to see those guns!"

Marlene shot Tess a look of pure challenge. "You wanna do that; you gotta come with me now!"

"Sir, this door's locked!"

"Get the battering ram!"

Tess grimaced. "Shit! Time to move!" She and Joel raced down the alleyway in Marlene's wake

Suddenly, the whole Quarantine Zone was taking on a very menacing demeanour to Joel's mind. Robert had been right; the military seemed to be on full war footing. As the two smugglers and their insurgent leader guide fled through the back alleyways, every street that they could see had masses of HMMWVs and four-axle heavy trucks packed with troops racing down them. The air was filled with the crackle of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion.

Marlene led the two smugglers up onto a set of roofs that looked down across what was once the harbour district before the Outbreak. Suddenly a large explosion sent a massive yellow-white fireball into the air. "Jesus! Was that your people?" Tess blurted.

"What's left of them." Marlene sounded understandably depressed. "The military have been hitting us hard and I've got everyone who can still fight spread out on hit-and-run missions to cause as much havoc as possible; keep the bastards disorganised and unable to hunt us in a methodical way." She shrugged. "Why do you think I have to turn to 'outside contractors'? We're making a fighting withdrawal here and I don't have the manpower to spare, even for priority missions!"

Marlene led her two 'outside contractors' along the zigzagging roof of a factory. Joel decided to ask a question that had been bothering him. "Things have been pretty quiet recently. Why would the military upset the apple-cart now?"

Marlene's voice deepened with frustrated anger. "Boston's pretty much a busted flush; it's only a matter of time before the supply lines this far out east collapse so we've been trying to pull out quietly. FEDRA aren't interested in letting us vanish and losing their excuse for all the shortages. They've been trying to rile us up and start a fight for a while!"

That didn't surprise Joel in the slightest. "'Trying'? Looks to me like they succeeded!"

That dig obviously got through Marlene's usually unflappable calm. "We're trying to defend ourselves from an unjustified attack whilst we were peacefully disengaging!" she snapped. Joel smirked and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. Marlene growled and led the other two through a set of dormer windows into the upstairs store-room of an abandoned factory building.

As they descended a wide set of stairs to what was once a roadway, Tess couldn't help but notice Marlene's flagging strength and the way she was favouring her wounded side. "Hey! How are you holding up Marlene?"

"I'll live. I've had worse."

The three outlaws were crouched behind an old concrete lane divider and looking across a small flood-basin or dock area. At the other side, a blue-uniformed FEDRA soldier, wearing the light equipment of a military policeman, guarded a door into the sub-structure of the warehouse area that ran overhead.

Marlene pointed to that door. "See that? That's our way out."

Joel frowned. You never got one soldier on lone guard duty and the fact that Joel couldn't see the others didn't mean anything good. "I am not a fan of these odds."

"We can sneak by them," Marlene insisted. The woman smirked, temporarily forgetting the spreading ache of her injuries. "Of course, I know that 'sneak' isn't exactly your style!"

"Cute," Tess muttered before continuing more loudly. "Lead the way; we'll see how it goes."

The first step was to get across an open space overlooking the basin area to a set of stairs leading to the upper level to the left. This wasn't anywhere near as difficult as Joel had feared. He, Tess and Marlene darted from divider to divider. The guard on the opposite side of the dock, by the door, didn't seem to be particularly interested in keeping a lookout for anything. Maybe they didn't think that there was there any threat in the area. If that was the case, well, they were about to get a rude awakening.

At the top of the stairs, the mystery of the location of the rest of the soldiers from this unit was resolved. Joel, Marlene and Tess dropped down as low as they could behind a stack of tarpaulin-covered drain-pipes. On the other side two soldiers stood in a doorway. "You picked the wrong day to fuck with us!" one of the soldiers, a sergeant, snarled.

"Go screw yourselves," replied a bitter voice responded from inside the building.

The sergeant didn't bother to reply. He nodded at the other soldier who dragged out a bound man with a sack over his head and dragged him away to the centre of the big handling area built over the basin. "Hey, I missed all the action!" a mocking voice declared from inside the building.

"Justice waits for no-one private," was the sergeant's emotionless response

"Ah, whatever," the unseen private griped quietly.

Marlene tensed; she was clearly ready to jump up and intervene as the struggling man was dragged away. Joel put a hand on the dark-skinned woman's shoulder and he watched as she looked down, her expression nauseous but nodded consent. This was not the moment to start a firefight against unknown odds. After a long moment, she looked up again and leaned over, her lips touching Joel's ear. "I've got this one; you get behind the other one."

Joel nodded. Staying low, he crab-walked through an outer door into what looked like a tool storage room. One the other side of the room was a second door into an internal corridor. Marlene knows this place, he noted to himself. It was probably a Firefly hideout or at least somewhere she passed through regularly. Quietly, he slid over a metal office desk blocking the corridor and came up behind the unnamed private.

A shift in the light at the other end of room told Joel that Marlene was tackling the sergeant. "What the…?" The private's shocked tone confirmed it but, before the soldier could grab his weapon, Joel was upon him, his hand crushing the soldier's wind-pipe.

Marlene folded her knife and, with Tess, sneaked into this new room which looked like a workshop to Joel's eye. "Stay quiet!" Marlene hissed. Joel had noted that she'd taken the sergeant's sidearm, a heavy, sophisticated 45-calibre semi-automatic that smugglers knew as the 'Enforcer'. When neither Joel nor Tess objected, she also took the magazine out of the private's Enforcer.

Why didn't Joel or Tess take one? Well, unlike Marlene, they didn't have a death sentence hanging over their heads. Having a weapon that could have only been taken from a soldier's dead body would be a lot harder to explain than a still-illegal but otherwise pre-proscription FEDRA-regulation 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

Tess leaned in to murmur to Joel. "Okay, there are at least two more of them; stay sharp."

Carefully, the three outlaws moved through the building. Joel, ever the scavenger, saw some stuff that caught his eye on a tool rack and snatched it up before heading through an internal door into the last room along the internal corridor. Tess peeked through the connecting door into the corridor. "We're clear!" she hissed.

Marlene peeked over the top of the windowsill. "Make that three… plus the one by the door on the level below. Christ, they're out in numbers today!"

Joel looked over the top too. There were indeed two sentries in sight, one standing almost in front of the window. He moved to the next window along. From this angle he could see two more guards, one standing behind a man-height stack of crates under a tarpaulin. There was a third guard looking at something out in the handling area. Suddenly the third guard straightened, drew his Enforcer and put a double-tap into something on the ground. No prizes for guessing what that was. "Fucking good riddance," the solder muttered before striding back to take up a guarding position by a gap in the waist-high far wall of the handling area, as the second guard walked down the stairs beyond, leading down to the door that was the way out. Marlene squeezed her eyes shut and Joel gave her the dignity of not staring to try to see if she was crying. Credit where it was due, she gave a shit about what happened to her people.

Joel quietly slid over the sill of the far window. The guard standing in front of him never suspected a thing until Joel's right hand closed around his throat, choking away his life at the end of five panic-filled seconds. Joel sneaked back to the window. "I'm going along the right side of those crates; you ladies take the left and try to find some cover to give me flank cover. Tess nodded; Marlene didn't seem to like the idea of being the one taking orders for once but she obviously didn't have any ideas of her own and seemed inclined to co-operate for now.

Joel came up to the corner of the crates (which, alarmingly, were marked with biohazard symbols – what the fuck was stored in these things?). He peeked around. The way he saw it, there was no way to grab the guard ahead of him without the other one seeing. Tess and Marlene were about to start trying to edge around the left side of the stack and Joel came to a split-second decision. He jumped up and grabbed the guard around the throat with his left arm, clapping the muzzle of his Colt to the man's temple.

"Shit!" the guard yelped.

"Let's keep this nice and quiet," Joel's growl could have frozen a vat of water at twenty paces

The other guard drew his gun and levelled it at the hostage situation taking place right in front of him. "Drop the gun, put your hands up and back away, asshole!" he snarled.

"Hey! Look to the light!" The soldier turned to the noise and swung his gun around towards the new threat. Joel couldn't see it but, from hearing the Firefly battle-cry, he knew that Marlene was standing in full view of the other soldier. It was already too late for the man to do anything about it, though. Marlene's stolen Enforcer barked four times, sending the soldier staggering back, four red impacts blooming in the centre of his chest.

"God damn it! So much for 'subtle'!" Joel knew that they were on a short count-down now. He slammed the guard's head into the side of the crates, feeling the bone give fatally from the impact. Joel then raced across the handling area, pulling his pickaxe handle off of his back as he did so. In a crouch, he slid backwards into the wall at the top of the stairs just as he heard hurried footfalls racing up the stairs.

"US Army! Freeze!" The guard threw himself around the corner at the top of the stairs, leading with his gun. It was a dumb move, straight out of the book titled 'How to Walk Into an Ambush'. He never saw Joel in the blind spot behind the stairwell's shore-side wall before the pickaxe handle slammed into his gut, bending him over double. A second blow to the back of the head sent him to his knees and an upwards reverse golf swing to the face threw him backwards into the wall looking out over Boston Harbour before he crumpled lifelessly into a heap at its base.

Joel turned from his latest fight in a fury. "What the fuck was that Marlene?" Much to his surprise, the insurgent leader wasn't standing where she had been when she blew away the guard. Instead, she was kneeling by a quartet of bound, hooded bodies strung out in a line across the middle of the handling area. Joel walked over to her.

"Wally… Mike… Kayley… Sam. Damn it! Damn it to hell! You deserved better!"

"Your boys?" Joel couldn't help but ask.

Marlene made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Wally and Mike, yeah. Kayley and Sam…? Hell, all they did was live in this place and look the other way when we walked past! These bastards are killing bystanders for just being in the same place as my people!" Marlene stood up and glared at Joel with fire in her eyes. "Seeing this you still want to be neutral, Joel? Still don't think it's your fight or any of your concern…?"

"Marlene!" The woman stopped her denunciation and glared at Tess for the interruption. "You can't help them by cussing out me and Joel. We've got a cargo to go see, yeah?"

Marlene closed her eyes, drew in a deep shuddering breath and then opened her eyes again. "Yeah, you're right; we can talk about this later. Let's get moving."

At the bottom of the bridge, the three outlaws passed through the now-unguarded door. As Joel scanned the storage room within for any obvious threats, Tess and Marlene pushed a heavy set of lockers across the door, blocking it from easy use. "That should hold any back-up that display of 'subtlety' brings running," Tess remarked with an ironic quirk of her eyebrow. "Where to now?"

Marlene finished reloading her looted Enforcer and gestured with it to the room's exit. "This way."

As they set off again, Tess couldn't help but feel a bit of empathy for the other woman. She knew that she might not be able to compartmentalise her rage if she saw people she knew slaughtered either. "Hey!" Marlene looked over. "How you holding' up?"

Marlene managed a tired smile. "I… I'm runnin' on fumes… but I'll make it."

At the bottom of a staircase, the three outlaws had to pass through an alleyway. At that point, they heard something that Joel had been expecting and dreading in equal measure.

"Attention! Curfew is now in full effect! Any person caught outside without proper authorisation will be arrested and prosecuted!" Like all FEDRA announcements, the blandly threatening pre-recorded female voice cycled automatically every few seconds. The streets were now deadly to anyone outside the military.

"So, what are we smuggling?"

Marlene looked over to Tess from where she was struggling with the door that led out of the commercial kitchen the trio had entered. "I'll show you. Joel, help me with this."

With Joel's weight added to the insurgent's leader's failing strength, the door swung open. Off-balance, Marlene fell through the opening to her knees with a cry of pain, her hand snapping instinctively to her wounded side. "Hey! Watch it!" Joel crouched beside the fallen woman, ready to lend a hand.

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!" a very, very young female voice yelled.

Joel looked to his right and saw a short figure in a red tee-shirt lunging towards him with some kind of long, straight-bladed knife. Joel's hand moved to his Colt, holstered in his waistband but Tess was way ahead of him. She caught the small attacker's knife arm before it could descend. The girl looked at her and saw Tess already had her own butterfly knife in a professional knife-fighter's reverse grip. "Bad idea, kiddo," she whispered dangerously, making the other knife-wielder gulp fearfully at the death she could see in the woman's eyes.

Joel helped Marlene to her feet. The insurgent leader looked at the confrontation with a grim smile. "It's okay Tess, you can let her go."

Tess complied and, as she stood back, Joel considered this new acquaintance. The girl was short, barely coming up to his waist; she was probably only aspiring to be a teenager at this point. She was skinny and pale, like most kids of the Quarantine Zone, with shoulder-length dark auburn hair tied back in a simple ponytail. Joel noted with interest the old scar slashing through her right eyebrow. He looked over at Marlene. "Recruiting kind of young, aren't you?"

"She's not one of mine, at least not in the way you're thinking." Marlene hissed as she probed her wound.

"Shit!" The girl folded and pocketed her switchblade and raced over to Marlene, her face displaying open fear for the older woman. "What happened?"

"This… This is nothing; it's fixable. It changes matters though. Ellie… I can't come with you."

The girl stood back, her expression confused with a touch of betrayal mixed in. "Then I'm not going!"

There was a long pause as Marlene stared the girl down. Joel was shocked to see honest-to-goodness affection in the terrorist's gaze. "Ellie, we are not going to get another shot at this."

"But…" the girl's voice was pleading and maybe a little panicked.

"Eleanor!" the girl snapped to attention, her expression shocked. "Ellie, it happens now or it doesn't happen at all. You know how important this is." Marlene gestured to the two smugglers. "As I can't come, I got us some help."

"Wait a minute!" Joel interrupted the tableau, attracting everyone's attention. "Are you saying that you want us to smuggle her?" The girl, Ellie, glared at Joel in a way that seemed to say she was no more impressed with him that he was with her.

Marlene couldn't help but smirk at the reactions in the room. "Ellie Williams, meet Joel Miller and Tess St Clair." She turned away from Joel to Tess. "I need Ellie taken out of the Quarantine Zone to a rendezvous; there is a crew of Fireflies from one of our West Coast cells waiting at the State Capitol building."

Tess frowned. "The Capitol… That isn't close and there's a lot of places for Infected to hide from here to there."

"I wouldn't have bothered to ask you if you weren't capable. You hand her off to the cross-country team; they'll give you a proof of receipt to bring back. When I see that, you get all the guns Robert sold me and… no, double what he sold me."

That was generous. If anything it was too generous; Joel didn't like this one bit. Tess clearly had her own misgivings. "Speaking of our payment, so far I've only heard words. Where are they?"

"Back at our main camp."

Tess crossed her arms aggressively. "Well, we're not smuggling shit until I see them with my own eyes."

Marlene glared at Tess who glared back. Finally, Marlene sighed and nodded. "That's reasonable; I'd insist on the same." The woman stood a little straighter. "Let me just change this dressing and we'll go to the camp so you can verify the existence of the payment whilst I get this properly patched up." She looked over at Ellie. "There is no way in hell I'm letting this girl cross into that war-zone. I want Joel to guard her until we get back."

It was actually quite funny the way Joel and Ellie's objections rode over each other as they each stepped towards Marlene with an angry protest.

"Whoa, whoa, now I don't think that's a good idea…"

"Bullshit! I'm not going anywhere with him…"

Marlene focussed on Ellie as Tess dragged a rigidly angry Joel over to one side. "Ellie…" Marlene's voice was low, gentle and a little pleading.

"Marlene!" there was so much fear in the girl's voice; the sound of a child who had lost almost every familiar point of reference and didn't want to lose the last one. "H… How do you know them?"

Marlene looked at the smugglers with a secretive smile. "These two? They're the worst hypocrites in Boston. They'll shout loudly all day about being 'businessmen' and not giving a shit about who they sell what and why so long as the fee is good. The real fact though…? The real fact is that you could never meet a more honest pair of criminals in your life. Tess is a woman of her word who actually believes that good things can happen to good people. As for Joel?" Marlene's smile became slightly nostalgic. "I was close with his brother, Tommy, about ten years back. He told me that, push comes to shove, if I was in trouble and I needed help, I could always rely on Joel to watch my back."

Joel felt the old and bitter resentment at Tommy choosing Marlene and her mad, idealistic pipe-dreams over his family all over again. "Yeah... Was that before or after he walked out on your little militia group?"

Marlene scowled at Joel. "I seem to remember that he lost faith in you before he lost faith in us." Joel growled in response but couldn't refute that. "He's a good man, Joel; probably too good for this fuck-up of a world." In that, at least, Joel had to agree with the woman.

Tess put her hand on Joel's shoulder. "Joel, she's right. Take the girl to the entrance of the North Tunnel and wait for me there."

Joel pinched the bridge of his nose. "Jesus Christ, Tess…"

"Look, she's just cargo to keep secure, okay?"

"Marlene!" There was an eloquent plea in that single word from the girl.

"No more talking, Ellie. You'll be fine, I promise. Go; I hope that we'll meet up out West some time." The girl's hand and the terrorist's met briefly and there was a hell of a lot of emotion in that touch.

Joel sighed and turned back to Tess. "Don't take too long." He turned to Ellie and pointed an aggressive finger at her small, pale and innocent face. "You, stay close to me. You're my shadow, got that?" The girl nodded; her face was nearly a parodic mask of sincerity. Joel groaned in anticipation of the trial that lay ahead of him.

Outside Marlene's hideout (which had once been a diner), Joel and Ellie found themselves in what was once a scenic courtyard in the old Harbour district. Now, like so much of Boston, it was derelict and decaying.

Joel frowned as he looked around at the carnage that had clearly taken place hours ago at the most. There were at least four fresh corpses lying around the courtyard. "Whoa…!" Joel heard his 'cargo' whisper in horror.

Ellie swallowed her nausea at the sight of the corpse that lay less than a body-length away from her, his chest bloodied with six distinct holes in it. Any lasting illusions she might have had about 'the glory of the struggle' that she sometimes heard Marlene preaching about were now pretty effectively dispelled. "I heard the shooting but… What happened here?"

Joel was kneeling by one of the dead militiamen. There was nothing useful on him; the military must have searched the bodies for weapons before moving on. All that he found was a Firefly pendent in the name of Philip Liu, serial no. 000105. He shook his head, noting the man's arm-band with a black 'dragonfly' sigil. "Fireflies…" he muttered to himself. He stood and looked at the girl, who was kneeling beside one of the corpses on the other side of the courtyard, too afraid or repulsed to touch it but too fascinated, despite herself, to look away. "What happened is what will happen to us if we don't get off the streets… and soon."

The girl at least managed a semblance of a smile (of a sickly sort) as she stood up. "You're the pro! I'm just following you around like your shadow, right?"

"Right," Joel growled, uncertain if the little brat was co-operating or just mocking him.

As they walked down the stairs from the courtyard to road level, Joel noted that several 'wanted' posters for Fireflies now had black stickers running across them marked 'Executed'. Things were definitely looking bad for the insurgents in Boston.

The smuggler led the girl (who, honestly, was less nervous than Joel expected) through a subway running in front of a condemned apartment building. "Attention! Harbouring or aiding wanted criminals is punishable by death. Do not place yourself at risk. Report any suspicious activity immediately." That pretty much cemented the truth of Marlene's complaints about a new policy of 'guilt by proximity' in Joel's mind. With every breath he took, this little business arrangement seemed more and more a bad idea to him.

"C'mon; keep up," he murmured.

"I am!" Ellie's annoyed whisper came from surprisingly close behind.

Joel waited until a convoy of two HMMWVs and two four-axle trucks roared past before he led the girl on a fast sprint down the low-level walkway and into an alleyway that led out in to a courtyard at the back of several buildings and with the outer wall of the Quarantine Zone crossing its rear.

Ellie looked around the apparent cul-de-sac nervously. "So, where are we going?"

Joel pointed to the upper level of one of the building to the left side of the courtyard. "Up there; that's the entrance to the North Tunnel."

Ellie looked up, noting that the fire escape up the side of the building ended on the second storey. FEDRA had probably removed the final flight to stop anyone from entering what was likely another condemned building. "How do we get up there?"

Joel frowned slightly at the kid's sass. "Just stay and wait for a second." Ellie had a lot to learn about how to hide stuff in plain sight. Joel went to a half-collapsed storage shed and fetched a large dumpster, its Boston Department of Sanitation (BDS) logo barely visible anymore. He dragged it out and ran it into the steel support frame of the fire exit, creating a convenient first step.

Not bothering to indicate to the girl what to do next, Joel leapt up on top of the dumpster and then clambered up onto the first floor landing of the fire escape. Half way up the stairs to the second floor, he decided that he didn't want to have to deal with Tess's moods if the girl had a hissy fit about his attitude; he was about to help the kid up too when he noticed, with a certain surprised approval, that she'd already clambered up onto the dumpster and was hauling herself up onto the landing.

The two ascended to the third storey and paused while Joel pushed open what had been disguised as a locked fire escape door. Once both were inside, Joel pushed the door closed again and toggled on his flashlight; the dirty windows providing barely-sufficient light under the best of circumstances.

The two began to navigate the corridors towards their destination. Joel would have normally been more alert to possible threat but at this level over the ground and within the Zone, the corridors had no hazards, even in a condemned building.

"So…" Ellie decided to make some small talk. "This tunnel; you use it to smuggle things?" Joel gave a positive monosyllable, not really interested in conversation. "Like… illegal things?"

Joel restrained his urge to laugh. "More often than not, yeah; we wouldn't need to smuggle it otherwise, would we?"

The duo jogged up a staircase ever higher in the building; there was a pause before Ellie spoke again. "You ever smuggle a kid before?"

This time, Joel didn't hold in a snort of laughter. "Nope; got to admit that's a first!" The big Texan suddenly felt at ease to ask his own questions. "So, what's the deal between you and Marlene?"

"I don't know… I guess she's my friend."

They were about to cross a bridge over a long-derelict side-road. Joel wasn't going to take any risks; with the military on such high alert, there was always the possibility of snipers out hunting anyone who raised suspicion by being away from more-travelled parts of the Zone. He took the advantage of the pause to look at his current charge. "You 'guess'? You 'guess' that you're the friend of the leader of the Fireflies, the second biggest power left in the country?" He shook his head in disbelief. "You're what… twelve?"

"She knew my mom and she's been looking after me." The girl scowled at Joel in a dangerous way and the smuggler had to give her a solid grade 'B' for effort. "And I'm fourteen, not that it has anything to do with anything!"

Having not seen any movement or the characteristic flash of light off of a sniper 'scope, Joel led the girl in a quick sprint across the bridge into an identical building on the other side of the road. The two then ascended another storey to the top of the second building's stairwell. "So, where are your parents?"

"Where are anyone's parents? They've been gone a long, long time!"

That was a big clue in Joel's mind. The girl didn't sound sad, only indifferent and actually slightly annoyed; an orphan from birth then. He grunted noncommittally. "So, instead of staying in school, you decided to get your revenge on the world by joining the Fireflies? Is that it?"

Surprisingly, the girl didn't take the bait. "Look, I'm not supposed to tell you why you're smuggling me, if that's what you're getting at."

Joel turned back to the girl with an annoyed sneer darkening his already-fierce features. "You wanna know what's great about my job? I don't gotta know 'why'. To be honest with you, I couldn't give two shits what you and your momma's old buddy are up to!"

"Well great!" the girl's expression remained defiant.

Joel grimaced before smirking sarcastically. "Good, we understand each other. I'm glad we had this talk."

Joel led Ellie down a corridor of doors along one side, all locked with FEDRA biohazard seal mechanisms, and windows on the other. At the very end of the corridor, the seal had been crudely torn off the last door. It was an indication of just how long abandoned this building was that, a decade later, no-one in authority knew or cared about this.

Joel led Ellie into the long-abandoned apartment and closed the door behind him.

"So, what now?" Ellie asked, looking anxious.

Joel shot the girl an annoyed look. "Now we wait."

"Oh."

Going to the work bench in the adjoining room, Joel spent a few minutes making sure that his gun was lubricated and its spare magazines were fully loaded. Although he wasn't much of a tailor he tried to fix the damage to his flak vest. Then he spent a few minutes wrapping duct tape around his club's head and soldered some thin bits of metal to sides of his good shiv, hopefully adding a few uses to their lifespan. He quickly became aware of Ellie's curious eyes upon him. She was hardly distracting but he knew enough about kids to know what was going to happen next. "What are you doing'?" she asked, surprisingly gently.

"I… am killing time!"

"Well… what am I supposed to do?"

Joel smirked sarcastically. "I am sure that you'll figure that out."

Joel knew that the best way to distract a kid was to feed them. Like all smuggling facilities, the entrance to the North Tunnel had some secured storage from which Joel grabbed a ration bar and a bottle of relatively pure water (filled from a rainwater cistern on the roof), both of which he gave the girl before returning to his work.

After re-donning and re-holstering all his gear, he walked back into the main room where Ellie was peering at the long-dead TV set thoughtfully. She watched him like a hunting hawk as he lay down on the couch. "Still killing time?"

Joel nodded mutely then closed his eyes, determined to get some rest; a very, very difficult job likely awaited him tonight. There was a pause and then a gentle hand ghosted across his left wrist before darting back like a startled butterfly. "Your watch is broken…" Ellie whispered.

To be continued…