hbo © the last of us
season 1, episode 2

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
LATE JULY ✷ 2023

━━ LENA REMEMBERED THE Huntington Hotel as if she were once again a little girl. For someone who had entire years of her memories barred out of her mind like a well-guarded safe, she could close her eyes and picture every table, every chair, and every little poster adorning the walls.

          Only now, everything was submerged under murky green water — likely a result of the increasing Bostonian floods.

          "You've gotta be kidding me!" Ellie exclaimed, marveling at the (not so impressive, in Lena's opinion) sights of the outside world.

          "I guess FEDRA school doesn't do field trips." Lena chortled as she walked into the hotel, stopping at the top of the stairs to look down at the inundated lobby. When she was a teenager, her mother had picked up two weekly shifts at the Huntington, and young Lena was more than happy to accompany her.

          Not only did she get some spare cash for clothes and books, — which was way more than a child with a life like hers could ever dream of — but whenever her boss wasn't looking, she stole five minutes out of her work to sit in front of the piano and mindlessly jab her fingers against the keys. Before moving into a new home with her fiancé and hiring a private tutor to teach her how to play an old piano she'd found in a garage sale, that was the first time in Lena's life when her interest in music had been piqued.

          "You ever stay in a place like this?" Ellie asked, glancing at the adults behind her with the usual smile on her face.

          "Not exactly. But I did fall asleep behind that desk when I was a kid." Lena said, pointing a finger toward a metal table that was obstructed by fallen shelves.

          "You worked in this hotel?"

          "When I was a bit older than you, yeah. My mom was the cleaning lady, and her boss sometimes had me answering the phone for some extra change."

          "How do you even know what this is?" Joel asked, slowly turning to Ellie.

          "Have you ever heard of books?" the girl deadpanned, earning herself an eye roll from the older man. Lena and Tess exchanged a quick glance, smiling at the childish exchanges between the two.

          Even though she didn't want to admit it, Lena was beginning to like Tess. She tried not to, — the main reason being their eventual separation in the hours that were to come — but after surviving two decades in a living hell, spending half a day with a person made you feel like you've known them your entire life.

          She didn't need to know whether Tess had been married or not, if she'd lived an extremely tedious or extremely interesting life before the outbreak. It didn't matter, not anymore. For Lena, the small gestures made by the other woman and her companion were enough for her to know that she could — or at least she hoped — trust the two.

          Joel was the first one to step into the water, disrupting Lena from her deep thoughts.

          "Wait, are we going in there?" Ellie asked, the corners of her mouth upturned in disgust as she looked at the particles of trash and waste that floated on the surface.

          "Yeah, we gotta get to the stairwell on the other side." Tess replied.

          The girl looked almost shaken. "Well, I— I don't know how to swim."

          Joel plunged knee-deep into the water. "Seriously?" he asked.

          "Do you think we have pools in the QZ?"

          "No, smart ass. I mean." the man replied, jumping to let the girl know that the water was not deep enough for her to drown.

          "I was not supposed to know that." Ellie curled her lip.

          As the two made their way into the flood bartering snide remarks, Lena and Tess remained a few steps behind.

          "Haven't had this much fun in a while." the former stated.

          Tess raised an eyebrow, staring at Lena as she'd just said the craziest thing on the planet. "This means 'fun' to you?" the woman queried, tipping her head toward the liquid that covered half of the room.

          "No, I mean them." Lena jutted her chin at the man and the teenager wading in front of them. "Seeing an almost senior citizen and a little girl talk like that to each other definitely wasn't on my plans for today. But then I guess none of this was, either."

          "I'm gonna tell Joel you called him that." Tess taunted, but there wasn't a trace of malicious intent in her voice. "Just make sure your heart doesn't decide to give out while we're at it. I'm not gonna be the one to pick you up if you fall face down in the water."

          Lena shook her head, smiling at the woman's comment.

          "This is so gross." Ellie talked to herself as she walked toward the reception table. "Oh, check this out!"

          The girl threw herself over the counter, studying all of the objects that had been left on the desk — most of them probably strange or useless to her — with a curious smile on her face.

          "Ding, ding!" Ellie said in a high-pitched voice, pressing her finger against the bell. "Yes, sir, I would like your finest suite, please!" after finishing her sentence, she switched to a deeper tone. "Yes, ma'am, would you like me to take your luggage?"

          Joel and Tess exchanged an amused look, turning to glance at Lena. The latter lifted her hands in the air, preparing to speak when the man interrupted her.

          "I know what you're going to say now. She's not your kid, not your responsibility."

          Lena smiled sardonically at him. She approached the piano and pressed a few random keys, the notes echoing through the room. After so many years, the instrument still seemed to be in tune.

          "You're a weird kid." she heard Joel say to Ellie.

          "You're a weird kid." the girl repeated as she played, pushing the baggage cart around. Lena heard the rustle of metal before Ellie swore out in surprise. Before she knew what was happening, the woman had already made her way toward the girl and Joel, her weapon drawn from its sheath.

          "Just a skeleton." Joel explained as they stood in place, watching the mount of bones slowly sink back into the shallow depths of the water.

          Lena approached the girl, pulling her softly by the sleeve of her shirt. "It's the second time you almost get yourself killed. So stay close to me or die."

          She was beginning to realize; Ellie might not have been her child, but she was the woman's responsibility — much more than she was anyone else's.

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          The last three days of Lena's life had been so chaotic that she felt like her body was slowly going to fall apart, piece by piece. And it would start with her legs.

          "Phew." the woman sighed when the black-and-white sign of the tenth floor finally came into her view. She felt like throwing herself on the dirty moquette and wait until her heart went into overdrive, but she didn't want to give Tess and Joel one more chance to think that she wasn't adequate for their mission. Instead, she contented herself with cupping the skin above her heart while she waited for the beats to become regular once more. "Haven't had this good of a sprint in years." "

          "Holy shit." Tess soon joined her, panting for breaths as she pressed her hands over her kneecaps.

          "Come on, it wasn't that bad." Ellie replied sarcastically, shrugging her shoulders like it was no big deal.

          "You try climbing ten fuckin' floors with our knees." the woman said. "See how you feel."

          The group advanced through the dilapidated hallway, passing by struck-down doors, sun-bleached wallpaper, and disarrayed decoration — a reminder, frozen in time, of all of those people and families who'd been vacationing in Boston and had fled the hotel when the outbreak began. The four soon reached the door that gave them access to the balcony.

          "Well, when the fuck did that happen?" Tess asked, looking at the entrance that was barred by blocks of fallen boulders. She approached the door to her right and began swinging her weight against it, but it wouldn't give in. She turned to Joel. "Maybe that one."

          He tried to unlock the door, but the result was the same as Tess'.

          "Well, maybe I could climb up there, work my way around, and open it from the inside?" Tess suggested, inspecting all of the gaps and cracks where she could fit.

          "Uh, no, I'm the smallest, so it'd be easier to get through." Ellie said.

          "No. You're staying back. Tess and I are going."

          There was no way in hell Lena was going to let the girl jump to the other side undefended and unable to protect herself — at least not when Ellie was the only ticket to finding Chelsea alive and well.

          "Give us a hand?" Tess asked, turning to her partner.

          The man reluctantly agreed. With his back pressed flat against the surface of the fallen rocks, he crouched and knitted his hands together, waiting for the two women to boost themselves over the surface.

          Tess went first, and Lena followed her.

          "Holy shit." the latter muttered as she observed the scenery around her. There were bookshelves, suitcases, and all sorts of knick-knacks stacked against the door — which meant that it would take them a few minutes to clean everything out. Lena silently cursed whoever had decided that barricading themselves inside a hotel hallway had been a good idea.

          She turned to her right, to a briefcase filled with dollar bills resting near a skeleton that had a bullet hole in the skull. "Poor bastard. The world was falling apart and he thought that his money was more important to survivin'."

          "Rich folks were always like that." Tess raised the corner of her mouth, smirking. "Wanna help me?"

          Lena nodded. She drew closer to the wooden shelf and dug her fingernails into the surface, grunting in effort as she and Tess tried to knock the gargantuan piece of furniture away from the floor.

          It took them a minute or two, but when they were done they retreated into the cooler depths of the hallway, allowing themselves to catch their breath for a moment.

          "You're from here, aren't you? Tess asked.

          "Yeah."

          "I could tell. By the accent."

          "And you?"

          "Up from Detroit."

          "Michigan, hm. I lived there for a couple of years with my father when I was about Ellie's age. But then moved back here for high school." Lena answered. "If you don't mind me asking, why stay here? I mean, I'm not saying that the outside world is better. But there is better than Boston QZ. So what's keeping you here? Kids, maybe pets, business . . . Joel?"

          Tess laughed through her nose at Lena's suggestion, but there was still a sad look on her face. Maybe a friend, a family member, or a dead child she did not want to talk about with Lena. "No, no. Nothing of the sort. I guess I'm just too used to this place to leave now. And Joel and I . . . we're not like that."

          From the feigned nonchalance on her face, maybe Tess wished they were — but Lena kept quiet. She didn't want to feed the flames any further.

          "I could ask you the same thing. Why stay, but why leave?"

          "I wanted something good for myself. You can never really escape the Fireflies, but if I'd've stayed any longer in the same state line as Marlene, I think I would've murdered her."

          Tess chuckled. "You're not the only one."

          "I closed my eyes, picked a number from one to fifty in some booklet I had and it came to seven. Connecticut it was."

          "And your daughter? Did you take her with you?"

          "Only when she was younger. And then middle school came, the quarantine zones in Bridgeport and New Haven went to shit, and they were beginning to ration our food again . . . so I sent her to the only place I knew she'd be safe from the Firefly business."

          "Let me guess, FEDRA school." Tess had been listening to her story intently, almost as if taking mental notes.

          Lena didn't blame her. It was too easy to fake a convincing, heart-warming story about the power of love and family those days that she wouldn't even believe her own sob story if she was on the other end of the conversation.

          "And now she ran away?"

          "With her dad, yes. My ex-husband is a Firefly. Philip Smith, maybe you know him. He's . . . infamous in Boston."

          "Oh yeah, that asshole." Tess rolled her eyes. "Sorry if —"

          "No, no, it's okay." Lena reassured her. "We'd still be together if he wasn't one. So trust me, I know."

          "He kidnapped your kid?"

          "No, I don't think so. But they've been meeting in secret for some time. She left one of his Firefly pendants in the room." the weight of the piece of jewelry that was tucked in the pocket of her jeans became heavier as she remembered she was carrying it around. "And I can already imagine the kind of crap he's been feeding her about the Fireflies."

          "Marlene has tried to sell me her bullshit since the first day Joel and I arrived in town. It's like a goddamn pyramid scheme. The more people you bring into her game, the more she likes you." Tess said.

          "Thing is, kids born after these days don't want to work anymore. They see the shit we put ourselves through, so they think they can only choose one of two things: FEDRA or the Fireflies. I've heard of teenagers stabbing themselves over their factions before they're even a part of it."

          "I get it, I do. Work for what? One ration card a week? Rat-infested apartments? This poor excuse of a provisional government?" Tess shook her head. "I would've starved by now if I didn't deal my guns."

          The conversation died down for a few moments. "Let's get this over with. The sooner we finish, the sooner we're out of here." Lena suggested. Tess nodded, and the two got back to work.

          When they were finished, the latter jiggled the doorknob and pressed a palm against the wooden casing. "You can put the gun, Joel." she cracked open the door and allowed Ellie and the man inside.

          "What now?" he asked, but Tess remained silent.

          The group walked through the cold hallway, reaching the rooftop lounge in a few moments.

          When the outbreak began, the Huntington Hotel was midway through much-needed renovations. There were traces of handiwork everywhere, like the rusted crowbars, hammers, and hoes, all of them forgotten by the workers who'd tried to heedlessly run out of the building as the infection spread through Boston.

          Tess approached the balcony with hurried steps. She raised her arms together, pulling the two parts of the makeshift plastic curtain apart with one swift motion — revealing the amalgamation of lying on the streets, one so close to the other that their formation resembled a branch of a tree, a branch of fungus.

          Ellie stepped on the lower rail, stooping herself above the balcony so that she could get a better look at the sight below. Her eyes grew wide as the shrieks of the infected echoed through the empty streets.

          "There's so many." she noted, barely adverting her gaze from the writhing bodies.

          "Holy shit." Lena muttered, a chill running down her spine. She'd been out in the open city by herself less than a day before, and the possibility of having been cornered by the mass of infected became more and more palpable to her, making the blood in her veins freeze. "I didn't know Boston got this bad."

          "Well, I'm sorry this isn't as fancy as you'd expected. But we're gonna have to cross," Tess replied, lifting a finger and pointing it toward a distant building with a golden dome that gleamed in the morning sunlight. "All the way to there."

          "How— how does it even get this bad?" Ellie asked.

          "The last time we were here, they were still deep inside the buildings." Tess explained. "Then I guess enough people came looking for the QZ, they went inside seeking shelter . . . and that's how they get more and more of the city bit by bit, year after year."

          Ellie glanced down, her stare becoming void as her mind was filled with thoughts of terrifying, morbid curiosity. "They're connected."

          "More than you know." Tess added. "The fungus also grows underground. Long fibers like wires, some of them stretching over a mile. Now, you step on a patch of cordyceps in one place, and you can wake a dozen infected from somewhere else. Now they know where you are, now they come. You're not immune from being ripped apart. You understand? It's important. I'm tryin' to keep you alive."

          The young girl nodded curtly. "So we're not going that way."

          "No." the woman replied.

          "I don't know the ins and outs of the city anymore," Lena said. "But if we want to reach the State House by midday, we can go through the—"

          "Museum." Joel completed her sentence.

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          "You've gotta be fucking kidding me." Ellie swore as the group reached the museum building.

          It had become uglier than Lena remembered it to be, with its once beautiful brick walls adorned with limestone carvings now covered with intertwined thick boughs of fungus that grew and extended to the ground, blocking the main entrance to the museum.

          Tess pressed the side of her hand to her forehead to stop the sun from blinding her, and she bent her head back to glance at the second-story balcony.

          "Well, there's a way across from the top floor."

          Lena shook her head. "I don't think we need it." she said, marching toward the door. She knelt in front of the thinnest branches of the fungus and softly pressed two fingers against the crinkly surface.

          "Dry?" Joel asked, smashing the butt of his rifle against another patch of overgrown rot. "Could mean they're all finally dead in there."

          Tess and the man exchanged a curt nod. They unstrapped their backpacks and lowered them to the ground, searching for flashlights. Lena dove her hand into the side pocket of her pants and retrieved a small, portable one.

          "Oh, man." Ellie sighed at the sight of the adults.

          "Marlene pack you one of these?" Joel asked, lifting the object in his hand.

          The unstrapped the baggage from her back. "Yeah." she replied.

          "Okay, so . . . more ground rules." Tess said. "We're gonna go slowly. If we come up against anything, you get behind us and ya stay there, okay?"

          "Yes." Ellie promptly replied.

          Before they entered the museum, Lena turned toward Ellie one last time. Managing her best threatening expression, she crossed her arms over her chest and spoke between gritted teeth. "If you decide to leave my side and wander off, I'm gonna let that bloater eat you whole while I run away."

          "Bloater? What's that?" the girl looked puzzled, but Lena didn't have the time to give her an explanation.

          "Just shut up and follow us, will you?"

          Ellie exhaled, cocking her head to the side and slanting her eyes. "Did anyone ever tell you you have an amazing sense of humor?"

          "Yeah." the woman deadpanned. "All of the kids I babysat before they died a horrendous death."

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          The museum was in a worse state than Lena could've ever imagined. Little swarms of dust danced in front of her flashlight, revealing all of the dirty and broken historical artifacts that had been left behind by the looters that had entered through the years. From the looks of it, the building hadn't been trespassed in months, maybe even years.

          Back in her days as a teacher, Lena had brought her class on a field trip to the Bostonian Museum once or twice. Back then, the children's faces lit up in excitement as they walked through the wooden doors, their little eyes glittering as they glimpsed at the star constellations and the dinosaur bones hanging from the ceiling. ll that remained of the objects that preserved nearly three centuries of American history was buried beneath sturdy mounts of dust.

          Lena followed closely in Joel's footsteps — gun pointing ahead and flashlight resting atop it — illuminating the littered bodies that had slowly fused into the branches of fungus that grew from between the small cracks of rock.

          If they weren't such a terrifying sight, the woman would've thought the dead were almost too beautifully tragic to ignore. Man and Nature, united in demise. If the Earth suffered, she made sure the people did too. If the people suffered, Mother Earth found a way to embrace them and send them to the next short without fright.

          "Yeah . . . cooked." Joel concluded, shining the flashlight in his hand at the dried figures a few feet in front of him.

          "Oh, finally, some fuckin' luck." Tess commented.

          "I guess we should've gone this way in the first place." the man added. It had taken them a few hours of aimlessly roaming through the streets of Boston, trying to find a way to walk to Capitol Boulevard without coming face-to-face with the horde of infected.

          Ellie went on her own way for a few seconds, exclaiming "Oh shit!" as she stumbled upon the corpse of a young man. He seemed different than the others, though. Whereas the other's bodies had been marred by the slow decomposition over time, the open wounds on this man's face shone too much in the light to be anything but recent.

          He had been left to die in a sitting position, his back resting against a counter and his limbs sprawled on the floor in every direction. His head was slightly tilted back, revealing great gashes that split his face open — like the marks of a claw that had dug too deep in his cranium.

          Lena pushed Ellie back softly. She crouched in front of the man softly, catching ahold of a nearby strewn pebble to press it against the wounds. When the viscous liquid came back shiny, she realized that something was not right.

          "It's fresh." she whispered to Tess and Joel.

          "What the fuck did that?" Ellie had a perplexed face, but still, she could not bring herself to look away from the bloodied mess in front of her eyes.

          "Maybe . . ." Tess' voice faltered. "Maybe he was attacked outside and he crawled through the doors. The door was open, could've been him. I don't hear anything."

          "That'd be too much of a fuckin' coincidence." Lena pursed her lips together, getting up to her feet once more. "They're only loud when they need to be."

          "Who would you hear?" the girl asked, turning around to face the three adults.

          "Keep your voice down, Ellie." Lena pleaded, squeezing the girl's hand just enough to let her know that this was a serious matter.

          She got the message rather quickly, querying again in a whispered tone. "Who would you hear? Are you saying an infected did that? Because I've been attacked by one and it wasn't like that."

          "Okay, from this point forward, we are silent." Joel shook his head. "No quiet. Silent."

          "What—" Ellie began, only to be interrupted by the older man.

          "No. No questions. Just do it."

          Ellie looked up at Lena, seeking the answers to her questions, but the woman simply raised her pointer finger to the middle of her lips. The girl looked defeated but she slowly nodded, following after Joel and Lena with careful steps.

          The kid might've been annoying and stubborn as a goat, Lena thought, but she still knew when something was wrong. And from the way the blood in the woman's veins had begun to pick up pace, something was awfully wrong on the upper floor.

          The group ambled to the stairwell, where the mustard-colored walls were covered in parched bifurcations of fungus, while the old portraits of historic American figures consumed by time were engulfed in spiderwebs.

          Lena gritted her teeth as she took step after step, expecting the old boards to creek beneath her feet and wake the restless creatures that hunted humans.

          Joel's stride halted when he reached the top, the access to the rest of the floor obstructed by overgrown Cordyceps imbued with human bodies. The smell was so putrid Lena actually wanted to bend over the banisters and spill out the contents of her scarce meal. Even after twenty years, the putrid stench of decomposed carcasses mashed with the moldy infection could bring her eyes to water and her stomach to coil like a washing machine.

          But Lena didn't. She merely bit her tongue and followed after Joel, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other.

          As the young girl took another step, her foot landed on someone's bony hand, producing a loud crunch that echoed through the walls of the building. Lena and Joel instantly turned around to face the teenager, scolding her with looks while she did her best to excuse herself.

          When the pair were done shooting glares at Ellie, they turned back around. Joel raised his hand and directed his flashlight toward a door on the upper floor. INDEPENDENCE HALL was the inscription over the casing, written in bold blue letters. The man approached the double-doored entrance, pushing them apart so he could enter a room filled with ancient memorabilia. Guns, shotguns, flags, clothes, old gravures, and war memorabilia all rested inside dust-covered glass cabinets, with the scarce window light that came through the cracks in the blinds lighting the captions underneath all objects.

          He turned his head toward the women behind him, nodding his head in a small signal.

          Lena was surprised by the sound of debris seeping from the ceiling outside of the Independence Hall, and she was quickly pushed inside as the small trickle turned into an angry rumble of stone against stone. She felt Tess' palm pressing against her back, forcing the woman to fall on her knees into the dimly lit room.

          Her gun skidded across the floor, and Joel rushed to catch it and give it back to her before he extended a hand for help — which she accepted with a timid smile.

          If the clickers — or whatever other creature was out there — hadn't heard them before, now they sure did.

          Boulders and boards of rotten wood blocked the exit behind them, leaving the only chance at escaping somewhere in that exhibition room. For their own good, Lena hoped that the last moments of her life wouldn't be her choosing between a death by a clicker or a death from free-falling twenty feet from the ground. Though the latter seemed less painful, of all the ways to die that existed in the world it was definitely the silliest.

          A pair of screeches were heard through the room quicker than Lena had expected. With a swift movement, she strapped the gun back in its holster, unclipping the sickle from her belt and gripping it in her left hand — as it was much easier to take down a clicker with a blade than with bullets.

          Tess jutted her head to the side, silently ordering the group to retreat a few steps as another succession of click! click! click! sounds came from the adjoining nave.

          The four were forced to take a few strides back, gluing themselves on the dirty glass that presented all of the important armament that helped the Americans win the Revolutionary War and gain their independence. If it weren't for the clickers that waited to rip open her chest, Lena might've taken a stroll around the room and maybe mugged some objects for the collection she kept in her apartment in Hartford, but the situation begged to differ.

          The creature rounded up the space around them, and even though Lena could not catch a glimpse of its overgrown head, she could hear the snarling and steps of the clicker become louder and louder by the second.

          From where Lena's fingers brushed against Ellie's, she could feel that the girl's hand had turned so cold she had it easier to believe it belonged to a body that had been dead for weeks, not a young girl.

          They can't see, Joel mouthed, noticing Ellie's distress. He swiped two fingers in front of his eyes and then moved them to his ear. But they can hear.

          Ellie nodded in terrified astonishment. The girl knew, right then and there, that even if she were truly immune to Cordyceps, nothing would stop any of the infected from biting out her arteries and leaving her to slowly bleed out.

          Lena herself was terrified. It had not been so long since she had killed a runner or two — a couple of months before, when a smuggling run into the city had gone wrong — but how long had it been since she had come face to face with a clicker, let alone see the traces of their handiwork over mutilated corpses? Too long, the woman answered her own question. Hopefully, she hadn't forgotten how to wield a sickle in those fourteen years apart from the weapon.

          The shadow of the clicker grew larger on the opposite wall as it slowly walked against the backlight, highlighting its twisted figure and the mounts of fungus growing from the cracks on its skin and skull. Its limbs and head twisted at every step it took, almost in an orchestrated way.

          Lena closed her eyes and attempted to steady her breathing the way she'd been taught by doctors since her childhood — assuming that the pounding of her heart was so loud it would soon give away her position.

          The steps came closer as the clicker rounded the corner and approached the group. Fortunately for them, its back was turned and it was slowly making its way to the hall, but then something happened.

          A heavy breath. A sigh, coming from the frightened little girl that Lena was now in charge of protecting. Lena forced her eyes shut, wishfully thinking that the creature would just walk away if she pretended it was never there in the first place.

          But it was hungry for blood, and it wouldn't.

          The sigh was enough for the clicker to turn around and detect their presence to the little clicks coming out of its mouth. Joel raised his rifle and began emptying round after round in its body as the creature screeched and screeched.

          The clicker stumbled backward for a few moments, but it was quick to regain its posture and lunge at Joel's neck. The man struggled for a few moments, trying his best to keep the creature's teeth away from his skin. With the rifle still in hand, he pressed the trigger a few times, sending stray shots that attracted the other creature.

          Lena jumped forward and aimed to bury the sickle in the clicker's open head, but her attempts were swatted away by a strong grip that sent her sprawling to the ground, despite the fact that the infected could not have seen her blow coming.

          There was no time for Lena to regain composure. While she tried to look for the weapon that had fallen out of her hand during the strike, the clicker lunged at her with its arms and jaw spread open. Lena realized the only thing she now had to protect herself with were her bare hands, and she wasn't sure she'd last much longer than five minutes if the creature kept pressing its weight against her sore shoulder.

          She struggled to keep the jaws an arm's length away, but her strength wasn't the same as it had been years and years before. Becoming a smuggler had been a coward's way out from the days of glorious fighting she'd had in the Fireflies.

          If she were still thirty years old, she would've dealt with the clicker in the blink of an eye. But she wasn't, and so Lena had to make do with what she had.

          "Hey, fucker!" Ellie yelled, throwing a ceramic vase at the clicker's head. It wasn't much, but it was enough for the creature to become alarmed by the sound of the shards falling on the ground beneath it.

          Lena took advantage of the momentary distraction, making one last attempt to knock the clicker away. She pressed her thighs against her stomach, burying the sole of her combat boots in its torso and pressing as hard as she could.

          The infected shrieked as it collapsed against a bookshelf, but by the time it recovered its senses, she had already taken ahold of her weapon and ran toward Ellie and Tess, the three now seeking a place to regroup.

          Joel was still fighting the other clicker on his own. He had lost his gun and was struggling to deliver punches with his only good hand, but — as much as she wished — she could not aid him, not when the other infected was chasing her around the room like a cat chasing mice.

          Tess became distracted by her partner's fighting and accidentally bumped into a mannequin that was covered in an old Army uniform, prompting her to trip and fall to the ground.

          "Run! Run!" she yelled at Ellie as the girl rolled to the floor, using her elbows and the tip of her feet to drag herself underneath a glass table before the clicker could come for her.

          Lena approached the creature that loomed over Tess, grabbing its shoulders and smashing it into the wall with all of the strength her body allowed. Before the clicker could snarl once more, Lena lifted her weapon to the right and swiftly swiped it to the other side, delivering a near-perfect cut that left the infected headless. The body slumped against the wall, slowly dropping to the floor as the separated cranium rolled to the ground.

          "Are you fine?" Lena wasted no time in approaching Tess and lending her a hand. The other woman looked shaken, with her hair disheveled and her breath coming in quick hitches — but otherwise seemed alright.

          The woman nodded her head repeatedly. "Yes, yes. I'm fine. That was . . ." she lifted a finger toward the dead clicker, her hand shaking. "Quite impressive."

          Lena didn't have time to reply. The sound of glass breaking came from the adjoining room, followed by a deadly silence. She didn't know whether Ellie or Joel had been killed, both or none of them, or whether the other clicker was still roaming the building.

          What ensued was a cacophony of screeches and yelps as the infected's snarls were heard once more, accompanied by rounds of gunshots that came in quick succession.

          "Tess? Lena?" Joel yelled. The women emerged from their room, joining Ellie and the man while they tried to regain control of their breaths.

          Lena glanced down at the clicker, blood seeping out of the bullet wounds Joel had opened all over its body.

          "You alright?" the man asked, looking at his partner with worry in his eyes.

          Tess took a few seconds to respond. "Twisted ankle, but . . . yeah. You alright, Ellie?"

          "Well, I didn't shit my pants, so." the girl replied, rolling up the sleeve of her jacket to reveal another small bite mark, cut out right where the previous one had barely cicatrized. "You fucking kidding me? I mean, if it was gonna happen to one of us."

          The group fell into silence for a few moments, all of them studying the laceration on Ellie's skin with a mix of awe and fear. Lena had never seen something like that before, nor had she heard of it.

          All of those years with the Fireflies, all of the magical test subjects that turned out to be hoaxes laid out by FEDRA to trap Marlene and her band, all of the times someone had thought they were invincible because they lasted a couple more days than the usual . . . but she would have never guessed that the cure to the Cordyceps Brain Infection had been walking right underneath her nose. The daughter of her dead best friend, a schoolmate of Chelsea. Who would've thought?

          Tess was the one to break the silence. "Hey. Let's get the fuck outta here."

          Lena was the first one to agree. With blood covering half of her hands and clothes, she wished nothing more than to find her daughter and get to a place where she could rest her head and take a good bath.

          Sooner or later, she thought, she would trade Ellie for Cess, and be on her own way.

          She hoped, for her daughter's and her own sake, that it wasn't just wishful thinking.

━━━━━━━━━━

          Lena stumbled upon the rooftop access as she strolled aimlessly through the third story. Most of that part of the museum was made up of a genealogical archive — an extensive collection comprising the first families of European settlers that had come to the shores of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century — and a small library that contained some of the books brought into the United States to escape the Roman-Catholic Index.

          Lena approached the shelf, running her pointer finger across the spine of a heavy tome about —what she assumed, from her scarce Latin and Italian classes throughout university and high school — palmistry and divination.

          The light of the afternoon sun shone through the room, and that was when the woman noticed a rectangular window, big enough to fit even Joel.

          As she called the group to her discovery and the four of them traversed through the crack, Lena found herself happy to be relieved of the stench of infection and rotting corpses that permeated the air inside the museum.

          Outside, the chilling wind whipped at Lena's skin — as the sun slowly started dipping westward, leaving the building in the shadow of skyscrapers.

          Tess was the last one to fit through the casing of the window, using her hands and her only good foot to drag herself toward the light. When she was already out, Joel squatted in front of her and began searching for something in his backpack. He first found a white cloth that he handed to Ellie, saying, "Put this around your arm."

          The girl nodded, obediently. She turned to Lena for help, and the woman worked with dexterity to wrap a bandage around her fresh bite mark.

          When she was done, the girl approached a wooden ledge that connected the museum's rooftop to the building across. "Over there?" she asked.

          "Yeah." Joel returned. "I know it looks scary."

          Ellie shrugged. "That was scary. This is wood." the girl replied nonchalantly as she began crossing the path.

          "Just wait there. Give us a minute." the man yelled, taking a roll of black insulating tape out of his open backpack. He stopped for a few moments before doing whatever he was trying to do, looking over his shoulder at the woman that stood a few feet away from them. He coughed once or twice, but it was enough to disrupt Lena from her thoughts.

          She understood, promptly.

          They wanted to talk, and they wanted to do it alone.

          "Joel, stop." Tess chided, rolling her eyes at the childish acts of her partner.

          "No, no. I get it." Lena replied. She really did. If that was her — in pain, wounded and vulnerable — she wouldn't enjoy the company of a stranger, either. "I have some Ibuprofen for the pain, if you want it."

          Tess replied with a soft shake of her head.

          Lena started walking toward the wooden plank, her steps stopping as she was called back by the other woman.

          "Lena!" she yelled. Lena turned, taking one look at Tess before sensing that something was wrong with her. The mischievous glint in her eyes had disappeared, being overpowered by something sadder, darker — something that Lena couldn't quite put her finger on. "Thank you for helping me, back inside."

          She smiled uncannily, but the brunette tried her best to retribute the grin.

          "No problem. You did it first. I was only repaying a small favor."

          Lena went to join Ellie, leaving Tess and Joel behind as their voices rose in an indecipherable argument. The girl stood alone at the edge of the building, hands dropped along her body as she stared at the golden dome that gleamed in the distance. It looked much closer than it had back at the hotel, and Lena could feel her heart hammering in her chest as she realized Cess wasn't that far away from her anymore.

          The woman took a place to Ellie's left, slinging her blood-covered hands over the banisters. "Are you liking the world so far?"

          The girl shrugged. "I don't know, really. Has it always been like this?"

          "Back then?" Lena answered, shaking her head as she smiled. "No. Before, it was something else. You had streets full of cars, of laughter, of life. And now you're left with this. It's like you're looking at someone you knew for a long time before they started slowly dying."

          "Did . . . did my mom ever come here? Or somewhere else in Boston, really. I just want to know. I know you said not to ask—"

          Lena sucked in a deep breath as she forced herself to remember memories of old times. "It's alright, Ellie. You see that sliding glass door, over there?" the woman pointed her finger at a three-story building that was placed right around the corner from the museum. The girl nodded. "Back in the late 80s, there was this huge ice cream place there, before some real estate agency bought out the owners. When we were in high school, Anna worked there. And she loved it because she got to bring spare ice cream home every weekend. Marlene and I would devour it at sleepovers. It was really fun, Ellie. For a while. And then university got to us."

          Ellie looked down, studying the marks on her shoes as she tried to internalize the information that Lena had just told her.

          "My mom . . . she was a nurse, right?"

          Lena nodded. "Hm. Best one in Boston, at that. She helped us so much during those first years of the outbreak. After she was gone . . . you could feel it."

          "Am I anything like her? Do you— do you think I've turned into someone she would've liked?" Ellie sighed. "I guess I'm just asking you because . . . you and that letter are all that I have left of her right now. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have the time to talk with Marlene after you hand me to the Fireflies. So I just want to know the most I can about her before it's too late."

          "Well . . ." Lena bit her lip, searching for the right words. "Your mom was really smart. Snarky and stubborn, too. I can see where you got that from."

          Ellie smiled at the woman's comment.

          "She was my first real friend. I don't remember when I met her, 'cause she's just always been there. She was kind and caring, and the glue that kept Marlene and I together. After she died . . . it was like the two parts of the brain lost the heart. We never worked. I wish I had a picture of her so I could show it to you. But Marlene did keep one from prom night in one of her diaries. I think it's all that's left, but if she still has it I'll tell her to give it to you."

          "Thanks." Ellie murmured. She was overcome by sadness, overcome by grief for a mother she had never gotten the chance to meet. The world was cruel, even crueler to little orphan kids, but of one thing Lena was certain.

          "If she were still alive," Lena spoke out her thoughts. "She'd be the proudest mother in the world. She loved you, Ellie. The love she had for you in those few hours is enough to last your entire life."

          The two basked in the silence that came after the small confessions.

          Lena had never fully healed from that terrible night fourteen years before, when her heart was broken into tiny little pieces and the pain came crashing down on her like a furious wave. In a way, she would never heal from it. Anna's ghost would follow her to the end of the Earth, and Lena had made peace with that.

          But now — after so much time — finding her best friend's daughter and getting to talk to her was like seeing a little glimpse of the past, a little glimpse of Anna. The cracks and indentations on Lena's heart were almost becoming whole again.

          At last, Joel appeared beside them.

          "Is it everything you hoped for?" he asked the girl, facing the landscape before him.

          Ellie cocked her head to the side. "Jury's still out. But, man, you can't deny that view."

          The three remained quiet until Tess followed with scraggy footsteps.

          "Come on, let's get there before it's dark." the woman ordered as she approached a ladder and began making her way down. Ellie followed after the woman, not another word said, leaving only Joel and Lena behind. Neither of them wanted to move, preferring to admire the view that surrounded Boston that afternoon.

          After a few moments, Joel cleared out his voice. "After you find your daughter? Where are you going? Back to Hartford?"

          "No, I don't think so." Lena replied, shaking her head. "I don't think I'm gonna make it far out of Massachusetts with every FEDRA soldier crawling up my ass. I'm on their radar now, so I'm gonna have to find somewhere to hide, lay low for a while."

          "Hm." Joel muttered. "I have someone out in Wyoming. That's why Tess and I are looking for the battery. She told me . . . she told me that if you ever needed a ride out there, you can come with us."

          "Cess' dad must still have some folks in Nebraska, so I'll think about it. Thanks for the offer, though."

          Joel shrugged. "You know, Tess really likes you."

          "Then I guess the two of us are gonna have to play pretend that we like each other for her sake." she chuckled.

          Lena and Joel exchanged a long glance for a few seconds. The woman had to admit, he was better looking than most of the men she knew nowadays — but maybe it was just the loneliness inside her speaking.

          Lena had sworn she didn't want anyone after the breakup with Philip, but deep down she knew that she deserved better than to condition her life after some asshole who'd had his dick inches deep inside at least three different women while she was pregnant.

          But it was a delusion, at least with Joel. They barely knew each other. And he was with Tess, no matter how much she tried to deny her feelings for him.

          "Lena, you—" Joel began, only to be interrupted by the calls of Tess.

          "Lena! Joel!" the woman had already reached the other side of the street, and she was now looking up at the pair. "You coming, or not?"

          The man coughed awkwardly, moving aside so that Lena could get to the ladder.

          "Ladies first." he said.

          Lena smiled as she began descending. "Hm. Maybe I don't have to pretend to like you, after all."

this chapter was . . . definitely something. it took me this long to put it out because it was so hard to write because nothing really happens but also a lot of things happen.

anyway. i had the time of my life developing a small friendship between lena and tess when i know tess is gonna die next chapter but still . . . it was fun!

i love ellie and lena. that's it. i don't even care if this is too early in the story for them to be having deep convos about anna because it would just feel weird for both their characters if they just didn't talk it out. also, when the anna flashback episode comes out, expect a lot of heartwrenching flashbacks from lena's pov!!

i don't even know why this chapter was so long, but there you go. almost 8k words for you. i hope it was worth the week and a half wait, babes.

love, livi 💌

ps: i have absolutely no idea if this chapter has any gargantuan grammatical errors since grammarly decided to give up on me but i've decided all 'big' errors when it comes to formatting, plotting, grammar, timeline, etc. will be fixed when i finish writing the book and i begin editing it. until then . . .

word count: 7983

date started: february first

date finished: february tenth

date published: februrary eleventh