The Last Of Us Returns

8

Chapter 8

Damon didn't let Grant reach the doors.

He thought about the pallet of canned tomatoes he had touched in Lena's warehouse, and the concrete under his own feet, and half a ton of cans crashed down between Grant and the exit. Grant stopped with one boot an inch from the pile.

"Say my mother's name again," Damon said, wiping blood from his nose. "Go ahead."

Grant looked at the cans, then laughed and stepped around them. "Nice trick, Quartermaster. Let's see how long you can keep it up."

When his car was gone, Damon turned around. Martha stood in the van doorway holding her insulin box. She had heard all of it.

"What happened on the ninth day?" she asked.

He told her in three sentences, because she deserved the truth. She couldn’t dare to cry. She put the box in her cardigan pocket, said, "Then I'd better not die this time," and went inside to find a kettle.

By morning, the Northgate story was gone.

Sterling Pharmaceuticals put out a statement before breakfast. One mentally ill patient had wandered off, three people had minor injuries, the police officer was recovering, and the patient had been found and returned to care. The mayor thanked the company for its quick response. By lunchtime, the news had moved on to a celebrity divorce.

"So it's over?" Benji asked, reading it on his phone in the depot. "That's it? It was nothing?"

"It's a lie," Damon said. "Four of them got out. Mr. Sterling's buying time."

"Time for what?"

"For the gala. He's got the whole board and half the city's money coming to that party on October 14th. He's not going to cancel it for a few bites."

Damon checked the news every hour for three days. The police quietly reported two more "violent patients" shot near Northgate, then nothing. Mr. Sterling had caught them. The date was holding, for now, but Damon had changed it once without meaning to, and he knew he could change it again.

So the clock kept running, and Damon kept moving. Tom welded the depot gate and slept in his truck with Sergeant. Benji drove all over the city buying steel plate, diesel and generators. Lena ran the depot with Max following her around carrying a clipboard. Damon walked through every pharmacy and hardware store he could reach with his hand on the shelves until his nose bled every night. When he got to the gun shop on Fifth Street, the owner told him a big man in a black jacket had bought out the whole back room the day before.

Grant was moving too.

On the fourth night, at eleven o'clock, headlights came down Kessler Road.

Damon was on the roof with Lena. He watched a white car stop outside Tom's new gate, and Celeste got out of the driver's side. Her sleeve was torn, and there was blood on her hands. She walked around and dragged someone out of the back seat.

It was Jace.

He could barely stand. His suit was filthy, his face was grey, and there was a deep, ragged bite on the side of his neck, still bleeding through a towel.

Damon climbed down and walked to the gate. Lena followed.

"Damon," Jace said weakly, grabbing the bars. "Please. Open it."

"How did you find this place?" Damon asked Celeste.

"I put a tracker under Benji's bumper the night you took your mother from my clinic," Celeste said. "I told you, I always find out."

From inside the car's trunk came a heavy thump. Then another. Lena took a step back.

"Mickey kept Jace in a warehouse near Northgate," Celeste said, without looking at the trunk. "One of the escaped patients got in tonight. Mickey's dead. Two of his men turned. That one in the trunk is his driver. I didn't have time to do anything else with him." She looked at her brother. "Jace was bitten twenty minutes ago."

Damon walked closer to the car. The thumping in the trunk stopped.

Lena noticed. "It stopped when you came near it."

Damon didn't answer. His forearm was burning again.

"Damon, I'm sorry," Jace whispered, sliding down the bars. "For everything. The wine, the car, all of it. I'll do anything. Please."

Lena crouched down so her face was level with his. "Do you know who I am?"

"The store girl."

"You'll never remember what you did to me and my little brother," Lena said quietly. "I'll remember it for both of us."

Celeste reached into her car and took out a silver case. She pushed it under the gap at the bottom of the gate, and it slid across the gravel to Damon's feet.

“My father had a treatment,”she said. "I took all forty vials from his safe tonight. They don't cure it. One dose in the first hour holds it back for seven days. After that, you need another, or you turn. Forty vials, Damon. That's all there is, unless someone gets more of your blood.

"Give me one," Jace begged. "Celeste, give me one!"

She ignored him and kept her eyes on Damon. "Do you remember the health checks I made you do at our company clinic every September? You thought I was being sweet. My father found something in your blood the first year we were married, and he told me to marry you and keep you close. On that wall, I told you I married you for your warehouses. That was the version I told myself." She nodded at the case. "Every one of those vials was made from your blood, Damon."

Damon felt the cold spread up from his forearm through his whole chest. His blood had been different before he ever died. The bite on the wall hadn't given him anything. It had only woken it up.

"My father knows you left me," Celeste said. "And this morning I heard him on the phone in his office, telling Grant to bring you in alive before the gala. Grant has forty men and every gun from the shop on Fifth Street."

Behind her, Jace's eyes were starting to cloud.

"You have about forty minutes to decide if my brother gets a vial," Celeste said. "And Grant isn't coming to kill you, Damon. My father wants you in a cage, so he can bleed you for the rest of your life."