The Last Of Us Returns

6

Chapter 6

Damon picked up his wine, drank half of it, and set the glass back down.

"No," he said.

Celeste didn't blink. "No?"

"I'm not your partner, I'm not your husband, and I'm not your science project." He stood and buttoned his jacket. "If you really want to know what's coming, go ask your father what's on the fourth floor at Northgate. Ask him how many of those eleven patients have died and gotten back up."

For the first time since he had known her, Celeste's face went completely blank.

At the door, Grant stepped into his path. Celeste told him to move, and when he didn't, she said his name once, cold enough to make him step aside. As Damon passed, Grant leaned in and said quietly, so she couldn't hear, "Twenty-four days, Damon. Tick tock."

Damon kept walking, but in the elevator he had to lean against the wall to stop his hands from shaking. Grant knew the date.

His phone buzzed. Benji, out of breath. "We got her. She's fine, she's yelling at me for driving too fast, but a black car followed us out of the clinic. I think I lost them at the bridge. I think."

"Go to Lena's warehouse. Lock the steel doors. I'm coming."

When he got there, Martha was sitting up in a camp bed in the back office wearing Lena's spare cardigan, teaching Max how to cheat at cards. "Your friend drives like a maniac," she told him. "And this girl's too good for you, so don't get ideas."

Lena pulled him out onto the loading floor with her arms crossed. "Your mother. In my warehouse. At ten on a Friday night, with Benji saying some car was chasing you. I've got an eight-year-old asleep thirty feet away, Damon, so tell me right now if someone's going to come through that door."

Somebody banged on the door.

Three heavy hits on the steel. Max shouted from the office, and Benji came running out of the back with a crowbar.

"Damon!" Jace's voice, drunk and furious. "I know you're in there! Open up!"

Benji peered through the little window by the door and went pale. Jace stood under the floodlight in the same suit from Monday, swaying, with a split lip and a fresh bruise across his cheek. Behind him stood six men and two black SUVs with their engines running, and at the front, in a long brown coat with gold rings on every finger, stood a short, bald man of about fifty.

Mickey.

In Damon's last life, Mickey had been a loan shark for a few weeks and a warlord for three years. He had taken the whole south side, and every Sunday he fed the people who couldn't pay him to the dead inside the old football stadium. He was the only man Celeste had ever been afraid of.

"Get Mom and Max into the office and lock it," Damon told Benji. "Lena, go with them."

"It's my warehouse."

"You sold it to me. Please."

She glared at him, then went. Damon opened the steel door and stepped out into the light.

"Mr. Hale," Mickey said warmly. "The man who bet eleven thousand on an exact score. Lou's my cousin, you know. He cried when he told me about you." He jerked a thumb at Jace without looking at him. "This one owes me two hundred thousand, plus interest. He tells me his family won't pay, and that you stole the deal that would've saved him. He's offered me this building to settle his account."

"It isn't his to offer."

"That's what I said. He says it's a technicality."

"Burn it!" Jace shouted. "Take it! He took everything from me!"

"You lost it yourself, Jace."

Jace lunged at him, and two of Mickey's men caught him and dragged him back.

"So here's my offer," Mickey said. "You pay his debt tonight, and he walks home, and you and I become friends. Or you don't, and I take this building, and the young lady and her little brother and your sweet old mother find somewhere else to sleep."

Damon looked at Jace, bleeding and crying drunk tears. In twenty-four days, this man would throw Lena and Max out of this exact door. In three years, he would kick Damon off a wall and laugh.

"I'm not paying his debt," Damon said.

Mickey sighed. "Gas."

Two men pulled cans from the SUV and started splashing the walls. Damon shouted that there were people inside, and Mickey said pleasantly that they'd better come out, then. The office door flew open, and Lena ran out pulling Max, with Benji half-carrying Martha behind her, and they got clear just as one of the men dropped a match.

The fire went up the wall in seconds.

Max started crying. Martha grabbed Damon's arm and gasped that the food was still inside. Damon wasn't listening. He was standing still with his eyes shut.

He had touched every pallet in that warehouse on Monday. He needed somewhere big enough to send them, somewhere nobody knew. Kessler Road. He had never been to the old military depot on Kessler Road in this life, but he had walked every aisle of it in his last one, a year after the outbreak, stepping over the bodies of the fifty men who died taking it.

He didn't know if a place he would stand in the future counted.

He pushed.

The pain dropped him to his knees. His forearm burned as if boiling water had been poured into the bite marks, and blood ran from his nose over his lip. Benji grabbed him under the arms before he fell.

Inside the burning warehouse, the pallets were gone.

Lena saw it first, through the open door. A second ago there had been forty rows of food stacked to the ceiling, and now there was only smoke and empty concrete. Mickey saw it a second later, and his smile disappeared.

"What did you do?" he asked quietly.

Damon wiped the blood off his lip and stood up straight. "You came to burn my warehouse. Go ahead. It's empty."

Sirens started in the distance. Mickey looked at the building, then at Damon, for a long time. Then he turned to his men. "We're leaving."

"What about me?" Jace screamed as they shoved him into the SUV. "You said you'd let me go!"

"I said you'd walk home if he paid," Mickey said, getting in. "He didn't pay."

The doors slammed, and the SUVs roared out of the yard with Jace still screaming Damon's name through the glass.

Damon sat on the curb with his head between his knees while Benji wrapped Martha in a blanket and gave Max his blue cap to stop him crying. Then Lena's shoes appeared in front of him. She was holding her phone, and he could see the numbers already on the screen.

Nine. One. One.

"I watched forty rows of food disappear in front of my eyes," she said, her voice shaking. "You touched every pallet on Monday, and tonight you closed your eyes and they were gone. So tell me everything, right now, or I press call and tell them the man who owns this building is a lunatic who knew it was going to burn."

Before he could answer, the radio in Benji's van crackled through the open window.

"...breaking news from the north side, where a patient has reportedly escaped from the Sterling Pharmaceuticals research facility at Northgate. Police say three people were attacked near the Northgate train station, and one officer was bitten..."

Benji leaned out of the van, his face white. "Damon," he said. "That's not twenty-four days."

In his last life, nobody had ever escaped Northgate before October. The outbreak had started on the night of the gala.

He had changed too much.

And now it was coming early.