The Last Of Us Returns

Chapter 1

"Push him."

Celeste said it without raising her voice, standing on the edge of the north wall with a broken ankle and three years of her lies finally laid out in front of him, actually laughed.

"You're going to kill me over a map?" he asked. "Celeste, those people in Block C are starving. I gave them food. That's all I did."

"You gave them food behind my back," Celeste said. "Out here, that means they'll follow you instead of me. I can't run this base with two leaders, and you know where every can of food in this city is hidden, so I can't let you walk away either."

Grant, her head of security, stood beside her with his arm around her waist, and he didn't even try to hide it anymore. "Told you he'd find out," he said.

"I knew about you two a year ago," Damon said. "I stayed for the people here."

"Then you're more stupid than I thought."

Damon kept his eyes on Celeste. "I built this place for you. Every wall, every route, every supply run."

"I know," she said. "And I'm grateful. But I don't need you anymore."

"You took my mother's insulin," Damon said. "She died in her bed on the ninth day, and you told me it was her heart."

"My father needed it more," Celeste said. "I married you for one reason, Damon. You knew every warehouse in this city. Don't make it more than it was."

Behind him, Jace, her younger brother, laughed the same way he laughed at family dinners when he poured drinks on Damon's head, and then his boot hit Damon in the chest. Damon went over the wall, and the dead were on him before he even hit the ground, and the last thing he heard was Jace yelling down at him, "Say hi to Benji for me!"

"Damon. Damon, wake up, man, you're drooling on my seat."

Damon jerked upright so fast he hit his head on the roof of the van, and the first thing he saw was Benji Carter frowning at him from the driver's seat, his best friend since college, in his faded blue cap and his delivery uniform with the ketchup stain on the collar.

Benji had died two years ago on a supply run Celeste ordered him on. Damon had held his hand on a dirty mattress while he bled out.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Benji asked. "You were twitching in your sleep. Bad dream?"

Damon looked down at himself. No blood. No broken ankle. But his left forearm was burning, and when he pushed up his sleeve, there was a pale ring of teeth marks on his skin, old and fully healed, in the exact spot where the first one had bitten him.

"What happened to your arm?" Benji asked, leaning closer. "Did a dog bite you?"

"Something like that." Damon pulled his sleeve down. "What's the date?"

"Your phone's right there on the dashboard, check it yourself."

Damon looked at the phone sitting on the dashboard, out of reach, and before he could lean forward to grab it, it was in his hand.

He didn't move. One second it was on the dashboard, and the next second the cold weight of it was sitting in his palm, and his left forearm gave a hard throb right where the teeth marks were.

He stared at the phone. Benji hadn't noticed, because Benji was busy unwrapping a stick of gum.

Damon looked at the date on the screen. September 14th.

The outbreak started on October 14th. Thirty days.

His hands were shaking, so he put the phone face down on his knee, took a slow breath, and looked at the empty coffee cup sitting in Benji's cup holder. He had picked that cup up earlier, at lunch, when Benji had made him hold it while he parked. He thought about it being in his hand.

It was in his hand.

He thought about it going back. It went back.

"Are you okay?" Benji asked. "You're breathing weird."

Damon looked at the cup, then at his arm, then out the window at the big gravel driveway they were parked on. He had walked across that driveway a hundred times. He looked down at a small rock near the front tire, one he had never touched, and thought about it being in his hand. Nothing happened. He thought about the cup sitting on that patch of gravel, a place he had stood a hundred times, and the cup was gone from the holder, sitting upright on the stones outside his window.

Anything he had touched, he could move. Anywhere he had stood, he could send it.

Benji turned his head, saw his empty cup holder, looked out the window, and saw his coffee cup sitting in the middle of the driveway.

"How did my cup get out there?"

"You must've left it on the roof," Damon said.

"I didn't leave it on the roof. I'm not crazy. Damon, why is my cup outside?"

Damon reached over and hugged him, and Benji went completely stiff.

"Okay," Benji said slowly. "We're hugging now. My cup is outside and we're hugging. Did Jace say something to you again? Because I swear one day I'll back this van over that boy and tell the police the brakes failed."

"No," Damon said, letting go and wiping his eyes with his thumb before Benji could see. "I just missed you."

"You saw me at lunch."

"I know."

"Well, you'd better go in, because it's Mr. Sterling's birthday dinner and you're twenty minutes late, and your wife has called me twice. Twice, Damon. She doesn't even call you twice."

"Wait here," Damon said, opening the door. "I won't be long."

"You won't be long? Last time you were in there until midnight washing Jace's car."

"Not this time."

The dining room was full of board members from Sterling Pharmaceuticals, and Richard Sterling, Celeste's father and the company chairman, sat at the head of the table telling a story everyone had already heard. Grant stood by the window in his black security uniform. Celeste sat at her father's right hand, twenty-seven and the youngest CEO the company had ever had, and she looked up the moment Damon walked in.

"You're late," she said.

"Benji's van broke down."

"It didn't. It's been parked outside for twenty minutes. I watched it from the window."

Of course she had. Damon had forgotten how little got past her.

"There he is!" Jace stood up with a bottle of red wine in his hand, already half drunk and loud. "The house husband! Dad's glass is empty, Damon, chop chop!"

A few guests laughed. Damon walked around the table, and when he reached him, Jace tipped the bottle and poured it over Damon's head, slowly, grinning the whole time.

"Oops," Jace said. "Since you're already wet, go help in the kitchen. And wash my car after. Keys are in my pocket, same as always."

Same as always. Damon had washed that car every Sunday for three years, and every Sunday Jace threw the keys at his face.

He thought about the keys.

They were in his hand. He looked across the room at the big glass fish tank by the wall, the one he had cleaned every month because Mr. Sterling didn't trust the staff with it, and the keys were gone from his hand, sinking slowly to the bottom between the orange fish.

Nobody saw it. Everyone was looking at his wet face.

"I want a divorce," he said to Celeste.

The room went dead quiet. Somebody dropped a fork. Then Jace burst out laughing and slapped the table so hard the glasses shook.

"Oh my god! Celeste, your dog wants a divorce! Where's he going to live, in Benji's van?"

Celeste didn't laugh. She put down her glass and looked at Damon properly for what felt like the first time in three years.

"Why now?" she asked.

"Does it matter?"

"It does to me. This morning you made me coffee. At lunch you texted to ask if I wanted you to pick up my dry cleaning. Now you walk in here and ask for a divorce in front of my father's board. Something happened in the last six hours, and I want to know what."

"I woke up," Damon said.

"From what?"

"From you."

Mr. Sterling sighed loudly. "Grant, take him outside before he embarrasses this family any further."

Grant came toward him, and Damon turned and looked at him, and Grant stopped walking.

"Don't touch me," Damon said. "I can walk out on my own."

He walked out of the dining room, and behind him he heard Jace patting his pockets and shouting at a waiter about who had taken his keys. He was at the front steps when he heard Celeste's heels behind him.

"Damon."

He turned. She stood at the top of the steps with a brown folder in her hand.

"Three years and you've never once left a room before me," she said. "Tonight you looked at Jace's boots and Grant's hands before either of them moved, and you looked at me like I'd already hurt you. I don't know what you think you know, but I don't like surprises."

"Then you're going to hate the next thirty days."

Her eyes narrowed. She walked down the steps and held out the folder.

"I had these papers drawn up three weeks ago," she said. "I was going to give them to you after the company gala next month. The house, the cars and the accounts are in my name. Sign tonight and you walk away with nothing."

"Fine."

He reached for the pen, and she pulled it back an inch.

"One more thing. Benji's van loan is with Sterling Credit, and I approved it because you begged me to." She looked past him at the van at the bottom of the driveway, where Benji was leaning out of the window with his mouth open. "Sign this tonight, and I call that loan in on Monday morning, and your best friend loses the only thing he owns. So think carefully, Damon. Are you still leaving me?"