The Last Of Us Returns

2

Chapter 2

Damon looked down at the folder, then at Benji hanging halfway out of the van window, then back at Celeste.

"You'd really do that to him?" he asked. "Benji's never done anything to you."

"Benji's never done anything for me either," Celeste said. "You made his loan my business three years ago. I'm only reminding you how many things in your life I'm holding up."

Damon took the pen from her hand, opened the folder against his knee, and signed his name on every page she had marked.

Celeste watched him do it, and for a second she said nothing at all.

"Call it in," Damon said, handing the folder back. "Monday morning. I'll be there."

"With what money? Your salary goes into our joint account, and the joint account is mine."

"I'll figure it out."

"You've never figured anything out in your life without asking me first."

"Then you should start paying attention," Damon said, and he walked down the driveway, and he could feel her eyes on his back the whole way to the van.

Benji had both hands on his head before Damon even shut the door. "What did she say? Why did she look at my van? Damon, why did your wife look at my van?"

"She's calling in your loan on Monday."

"What? Why? What did I do? I said good evening to her! I always say good evening to her!"

"It's because of me. I signed the divorce papers."

Benji stared at him. "You signed the divorce papers. Tonight. In the driveway. With wine still dripping out of your hair."

"Yes."

"And now I'm losing my van."

"No, you're not. I'll pay it off."

"Bro, you have no money! You told me last week she gives you an allowance! A whole grown man with an allowance!"

Damon pulled the door shut, and the broken edge of the handle sliced right across his palm. Blood ran down to his wrist. Benji swore and dug through the glove box for napkins, still complaining, and by the time he turned around with a handful of them, Damon was staring at his own hand.

The cut had closed. A thin pink line sat where the blood had been, and even that was fading.

"Press it, press it hard," Benji said, shoving the napkins at him.

Damon wiped the blood off and closed his fist before Benji could look. His forearm was throbbing again under his sleeve, and beneath the ache he could feel a cold pull in his blood, faint and steady, leaning somewhere north of the city. He didn't know what it was yet. He only knew he had died with the infection in him, and it had come back with him, and it had brought something else along.

"How much is left on your loan?" he asked.

"Eighteen thousand. Why?"

"I've got eleven thousand in my old account from before the wedding. Celeste never touched it because she thinks it's nothing."

"It is nothing! It's seven thousand short of nothing!"

"The Harbor City Foxes play the Kings tomorrow afternoon."

Benji gave him a long look. "And?"

"And the Foxes win three to nothing."

"The Foxes are going to get destroyed. The Kings haven't lost at home all season. Jace has been bragging all week about how much he's putting on them."

Damon remembered that game very well. In his last life, Jace had bet two hundred thousand of his father's money on the Kings and lost all of it, then come home drunk and smashed the windshield of Damon's car with a golf club because he needed someone to blame. Damon had spent the whole night sweeping glass out of the driveway while Celeste watched from the bedroom window and never came down. Jace had screamed the score at him so many times that Damon still heard it in his sleep.

"Three to nothing," he said. "Foxes. Trust me."

"You want to bet your last eleven thousand dollars on the worst team in the league because you've got a feeling?"

"Yes."

Benji groaned, long and loud, and started the van. "If you lose this, you're sleeping in my van and I'm charging you rent."

They found an all-night betting shop near the train station, run by a bored, heavyset man named Lou who read Damon's slip and laughed out loud.

"The exact score?" Lou said. "Three to nothing, Foxes? Buddy, I've been doing this twenty years. Nobody bets an exact score with eleven grand unless their wife just left them."

"She did," Benji said. "About an hour ago."

Lou stopped laughing and looked at the red stains all down Damon's shirt. "Ah. Well. It's your money." He printed the slip and slid it across. "Forty to one."

Benji's apartment was one room above a laundromat, and he went to bed complaining that he would never sleep again. Damon didn't even try. He sat on the couch in the dark and started testing.

He could pull the TV remote from the kitchen counter, because he had touched it a hundred times. He could not pull Benji's neighbor's bicycle from the hallway, because he had never touched it, so he went out, put his hand on the handlebar for one second, came back inside, and the bike was suddenly leaning against Benji's fridge. He sent it back to the hallway before Benji woke up and lost his mind.

Heavier things were harder. The couch moved two inches and left him dizzy, with his nose bleeding and his forearm burning so badly he had to sit on the floor for ten minutes. The fridge didn't move at all. Distance mattered too. He could send a cup to the betting shop across town, because he had stood there an hour ago, but it gave him a headache that lasted until morning.

So it had limits. But every time he used it, the burning in his arm faded a little faster than the time before, and by sunrise he could lift the couch without the nosebleed.

It was growing.

He sat on the floor with the remote in his hand and thought about the ration warehouse on Kessler Road that Celeste's team had found two months into the apocalypse, sealed and full, and how fifty men had died trying to clear the zombies around it. He thought about the gun shop on Fifth that Grant had locked his own people out of. He thought about every supermarket, pharmacy and hardware store he had raided in his last life and how many of them he had walked through before any of it happened.

If he touched it, it could come with him. If he had stood there, he could send it anywhere.

Thirty days was enough time to touch half the city.

The game started at three on Sunday. By halftime the Foxes were one goal up and Benji was pacing the room eating dry cereal straight out of the box. When the second goal went in, he threw the box at the wall. When the third one went in during the eighty-eighth minute, he grabbed Damon by both shoulders and shook him until his teeth clicked.

"Four hundred and forty thousand dollars," Benji kept saying. "Four hundred and forty thousand. Damon. How did you know? How did you know that?"

"I'll tell you everything," Damon said. "Just not today."

"Not today? You just made almost half a million dollars off a football game!"

"Benji, do you trust me?"

Benji looked at him for a long time, then let go and dropped onto the arm of the couch.

"I've trusted you since you gave me your only winter coat in college and froze for a whole week," he said. "Fine. Not today. But you're buying me a new van."

"I'm buying you two."

Lou went grey when they came to collect on Monday morning, and it took two phone calls and a manager before he could put the money together. Damon took eighteen thousand in cash, put the rest in his old account, and walked into Sterling Credit at ten o'clock with a backpack over his shoulder.

"I'd like to pay off Benji Carter's van loan," he told the teller. "All of it."

The teller looked at the cash, then at her screen, and then nervously at something behind him.

"Mrs. Sterling," she said. "This is the account you asked me to flag."

Damon turned around.

Celeste stood in the doorway of the manager's office in a navy suit with a coffee in her hand, and she didn't look surprised at all. Behind her, slumped in a chair with red eyes and the same clothes he had worn on Saturday, sat Jace.

"I had someone follow you on Saturday night," Celeste said, walking over. "You went to Lou's on Fourth Street and put eleven thousand dollars on the Foxes to win three to nothing. The exact score." She glanced at the cash on the counter. "My brother lost two hundred thousand of my father's money on that same game, and when he got home last night, he told me you'd look at him on Monday like you already knew."

Jace pushed himself up out of the chair, swaying, his fists clenched. "You knew," he spat. "You looked at my boots on Saturday like you knew something, and then you went and bet against me."

"I bet on a football game," Damon said.

"That's what I thought too, until this morning," Celeste said. She reached into her jacket pocket, took out a set of car keys, and set them on the counter next to the money. They were still wet. "Our gardener found these at the bottom of my father's fish tank. Jace had them in his pocket when you walked into the dining room, and you never went within ten feet of that tank." She stepped close enough that only he could hear her. "So I'm going to ask you once, Damon, and I want the truth. What did you do?"