The Last Of Us Returns

7

Chapter 7

"Turn it up," Damon said.

Benji turned the radio up with a shaking hand. The newsreader's voice filled the yard over the sound of the fire hoses.

"...the officer was taken to St. Anne's Hospital, where staff say he became violent shortly after arrival. Police have closed Northgate station and are asking residents in the area to stay indoors. Sterling Pharmaceuticals has not responded to requests for comment..."

"St. Anne's," Damon said. "That's in the middle of the city."

"Is that bad?" Benji asked. "Tell me that's not bad."

"It's bad."

Lena still had her thumb over the call button. She looked from the radio to Damon, and he watched her put it together, the twenty-seven days, the steel doors, don't open them for anyone named Sterling.

"This is it," she said. "This is the thing you told me about."

"Yes."

"You said twenty-seven days."

"It was supposed to be twenty-four now. It's early." He stood up off the curb, and his head swam, and he had to grab the side of the van. "Get in. All of you. I'll tell you everything while Benji drives. Every single thing, Lena, I swear it. But we can't stay here."

A fireman was walking toward them with a clipboard. Lena looked at him, then at Max sitting in the van in Benji's cap, then back at Damon.

She put her phone in her pocket and climbed in.

Benji drove. Damon sat in the back with his mother on one side and Lena on the other, Max asleep across Lena's lap, and he told them.

He told them about the gala on October 14th, and the first night, and the screaming in the streets. He told them about Riverside Base and the three years he spent keeping it alive. He told them about Celeste and Grant, and the wall, and Jace's boot. He told them about waking up in Benji's van with the bite marks on his arm. He told Benji about the supply run, and the mattress, and the bad joke about the van loan, and Benji had to pull over for a minute because he couldn't see the road.

He didn't tell his mother about the insulin. He couldn't.

He told Lena about the loading door.

She didn't say anything for a long time after that. She just sat with her hand on Max's hair, looking out the window at the dark streets going by.

"Jace," she said finally. "Jace did that."

"Yes."

"To Max."

"Yes."

She nodded slowly, and her jaw went tight, and she didn't say anything else.

Martha was the one who broke the silence. She reached over and took Damon's hand in both of hers and held it hard.

"Three years," she said quietly. "You did all that for three years by yourself."

"I had Benji for the first one."

"You had Benji for the first one," Martha repeated, and she squeezed his hand so tight it hurt. "Well. You're not by yourself anymore."

Benji sniffed loudly from the front seat. "I'm not crying. The air in this van is dry. I'm just saying, it's very dry."

"Where are we going?" Lena asked.

"Kessler Road. There's an old military supply depot out past the rail yards. It's been sealed for ten years, and nobody remembers it's there. In my last life, Celeste found it a month after the outbreak, and fifty men died clearing it out. It has steel walls, its own generator, and its own well." He looked at her. "And as of an hour ago, it has all your food."

"You sent my food to a place you've never been?"

"I've been. Just not yet."

Lena opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. "I'm going to need you to stop saying things like that."

His phone rang. Celeste.

He almost didn't answer. Then he put it on speaker.

"Where are you?" Celeste asked. There was noise behind her, wind and a car engine and someone shouting.

"Why?"

"Because you were right." She didn't sound cold now. She sounded fast, and focused, and angry. "I went to Northgate after you left. I drove there myself. The fourth floor's empty, Damon. All eleven of them are gone. My father had the security footage wiped an hour before I got there, and the night guard told me four of them broke through the ward doors, and the other seven were already dead in their beds when the guards went in. Except they weren't in their beds when the police came."

Lena's hand went still on Max's hair.

"My father told the board it was one patient," Celeste went on. "He told the police it was one patient. He's ordered the lab cleaned out tonight, and he's moving every vial of the treatment we've been working on to the house. Do you understand what I'm telling you? He had a treatment. He's had it for a month, and he's only giving it to the family."

"Why are you telling me this?" Damon asked.

"Because I don't know when it starts. You do." She paused. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking for a date."

Damon looked at his mother, at Lena, at Max asleep on her lap.

In my last life, nobody got out of that ward until the night of the gala. October 14th. Tonight happened because I sent you there. If your father doesn't catch all four, it could be sooner.

Get out of the tower, Celeste. Get somewhere with walls."

"And you? Where are you going?"

"Somewhere you'll never find."

"I'll find it," she said. "I always do." And she hung up.

Martha let out a breath. "So that's the wife."

"Ex-wife."

"I liked her better when she was a cold fish."

Benji's phone buzzed in the cup holder, and he glanced at it and swore. "Damon, it's your mom's old nurse from Greenhill. He's saying they're locking down the building because the hospital's full and they're sending patients over." He looked back at Martha. "Mrs. Hale, your insulin's still in the fridge there. We left it when we moved you."

Damon closed his eyes.

He had stood in Greenhill's kitchen every month for two years. He had opened that fridge a hundred times to check her medicine, because he didn't trust the staff. He thought about the white box on the second shelf with her name written on it in his handwriting.

It was in his lap.

Martha stared at it. She picked it up, turned it over, and read her own name on the label.

"Oh," she said faintly. "Oh, Damon."

"I've got you, Mom."

She didn't answer. She just held the box against her chest and leaned her head on his shoulder.

Damon pulled out his phone and dialed a number he hadn't called in three years, because in three years it hadn't existed. It rang four times before an old man answered, sounding annoyed and half asleep.

"Who is this?"

"Tom, my name's Damon. You don't know me. You're a retired engineer, you used to build bunkers for the army, you live alone on Cedar Street with a dog named Sergeant, and your daughter in Denver hasn't called you in two years."

There was a long pause. "Is this a scam?"

"Turn on the news, Tom."

Another pause. Then the sound of a television, and a newsreader's voice, and the old man breathing.

In Damon's last life, Tom had been the one who built Riverside's walls. He had died in the second year, crushed when a gate he'd built failed because Grant's men had stolen the steel bolts to sell to Mickey. He had been the only person at Riverside who had ever told Celeste no to her face.

"I have a building on Kessler Road," Damon said. "It needs walls and gates that'll hold, and it needs them in less than ten days. I'll pay you whatever you want, and you can bring the dog."

The television went quiet. Tom cleared his throat.

"How do you know about Sergeant?"

"I'll tell you when you get here. Bring your tools."

The old man was silent for a long moment. "Kessler Road," he said. "The old depot. Give me an hour."

Benji turned off onto a gravel road past the rail yards, and the depot came up out of the dark in the headlights, a long, low steel building behind a rusted chain fence with a padlock on the gate the size of Damon's fist.

"That's it?" Benji said. "That's our fortress? It looks like it's going to fall down."

"It won't. Cut the lock."

Benji got the bolt cutters from the back and wrestled with the padlock until it snapped, and they drove through the gate and stopped in front of the main doors.

The doors were open.

Damon frowned. In his last life, those doors had been welded shut. It had taken Celeste's men two days to cut through them. Now they stood open a few feet, and there was light coming from inside.

"Damon," Lena said quietly. "Is somebody here?"

"Stay in the van."

"Damon…."

"Stay in the van, Lena. Benji, lock the doors."

He got out and walked toward the light. His forearm had started to throb again, hard and cold, the same way it had throbbed at Greenhill when Grant asked him about his ankle.

He stepped through the doors.

The depot was huge and echoing and full of his food, forty rows of pallets stacked exactly the way they had been in Lena's warehouse, filling the middle of the floor. Someone had set up a small camping lantern on top of one of the rice stacks.

And sitting on a folding chair beside it, with his feet up on a crate of canned beans, a pistol resting on his knee and a cigarette in his mouth, was Grant.

"Took you long enough," Grant said. He blew out a stream of smoke. "I've been sitting here since nine, waiting for Celeste's men to show up in a month. Then about an hour ago, forty rows of rice came out of nowhere and landed in front of me." He tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the concrete. "Nearly gave me a heart attack."

Damon didn't move.

Grant smiled at him, slow and easy, the same way he had smiled on the wall with his arm around Celeste's waist.

"Evening, Quartermaster," he said.

Damon felt the blood drain out of his face.

Nobody had called him that in this life. Nobody alive in this life knew that name. It was what the survivors at Riverside Base had called him, the man who knew where every can of food was hidden, the man they lined up to see every morning. Grant used to say it as a joke.

"You came back too," Damon said.

"Three days after you." Grant stood up slowly and stretched, the pistol hanging loose in his hand. "Woke up in Celeste's bed with my whole head full of things that hadn't happened yet. Took me a couple of days to figure out I wasn't crazy. Then I watched you walk out of that dinner and leave her, and I figured it out." He shook his head and laughed. "You were always the smart one, Damon. I'll give you that. But you're not the only one who remembers where everything is."

He walked toward the doors, and Damon stepped in front of him.

Grant stopped. He looked down at Damon, and the smile stayed, but his eyes went flat.

"Don't," Grant said. "You can move a bag of rice, I can see that. Can you move a bullet?"

Behind Damon, the van door creaked open, and he heard Lena's footsteps on the gravel. Grant's eyes moved past his shoulder, and his smile got wider.

"Lena Ward," Grant said. "Well, look at that. You actually saved her this time." He turned back to Damon and leaned in close, close enough that Damon could smell the smoke on his breath. "I'll let you keep your little warehouse for now. But I remember everything you remember, Quartermaster. Every gun shop. Every pharmacy. Every place you're going to run to." He stepped around him toward the doors, and as he passed, he said one more thing, softly. "And I remember the ninth day, and whose insulin went into Mr. Sterling's bag. I wonder if your mother knows yet."