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📻 — CHAPTER TWO ..
' about survival '

          SKYDIVERS LIKE TO SAY, "It's not the fall that gets you, but the sudden stop at the bottom". While falling draws with itself several factors which determine by the field between seconds odds of survival, really its just a matter of how the contact is made with the final surface and what sort of surface will brace the impact. 

Wendy's half advantage was the fact that the initial impact with the ladder had been strong enough to knock her out cold, consciousness concretely insufficient in presence for her to act on the comprehension of quickly descending into abysmal darkness. 

Taking out the ability to tense her muscles and get them susceptible to ruptures in tissue that would incapacitate her, as well as the overall prevention of a series of bad instincts one might have during a free fall on an unknown distance, the first hit was the most important part of the nightmare that followed.

Survival, per say, is an instinct shared by all living things and humans are no exception to its display, making self-preservation a cornerstone to why ten years after the CBI changed the face of the world humanity was not yet wiped out of existence. But a human mind benefits from consciousness, morality, complex cognitive behaviors that can question the rapid action of a survival instinct, even deconstruct the righteousness behind it based on a series of fear factors which bottom line, might turn the goal of survival around. 

To survive in this world required a certain level of unconsciousness. 

From that haze which followed the hit, Wendy now remembered in a distant, absent throaty groan only fragments of different levels of pain. At some point, she could picture the sharp tip of a rod standing out of the hole's wall. The cold chill on her arms confirmed that she had lost her jacket to it, while a sting at the back of her scalp told her the rod may have collected some superficial skin too while decelerating her fall substantially. 

Without being able to picture what happened in between, her awakening brain filled the gap with the most plausible assumption: since her jacket was not fully zipped up, her weight dragged her down and out of it.

Then, the haze of unconsciousness clearly recalled a wooden pallet and a violent splash of water. A spasm in her left arm stood witness to the fact that a wooden pallet floating in the underground sewage system has played sponge to her fall. 

The final stage to waking up was the inevitable inhale which marked the opening of her eyes, at which point, water got trapped in Wendy's nose and all her unconscious state has shielded her from came crashing in not one by one, but all at once: the current of the water stream, the bottom of the sewer system facing her, the spasms in her oxygen deprived body and the blood cloud growing thicker and surrounding her right leg.

Before taming her instincts, they took over and Wendy let out a scream of terror. Water diluted only a nuance of its intensity while air bubbles surrounded her face in a mockery of all the oxygen she just lost. 

Frantically looking down Wendy saw the metal which pierced through her muscle. With hands desperately grasping at it at first, the decision was instantaneous to bite her tongue and push her palms into the littered ground and with the help of her good left leg, pull her right one off the metal. 

Don't think of the rust, her mind chanted between the panic of no air. Don't think of the green water. But while those were easy tasks to fight through while swimming up to the wooden pallet stuck by a rope to the margin of the sewage system, Wendy could not help but think of how she would have to drag her right leg behind and still find a way to climb out of this mess. 

Thinking was the killer of a good survival instinct. There was no time to thought in the run to live.

Coughed gasps for air spat out of her mouth water on top of the pallet on which she threw her elbows. Splinters stuck into her palms within the second as she tried to get on top of it while her weight tilted the whole thing down into the fast moving water. 

Fast moving water came in waves that built additional pressure on the already old rope which anchored the pallet. All the friction wore the threads off, bit by bit, the putrefaction turning sturdy ties to mere dust.

Wendy tossed her right knee over the pallet, muffling her scream onto her left upper arm, but before she could even glimpse at the platform the pallet was anchored to and the door that would probably lead to upper levels and to the surface as it looked like it belonged to sewer maintenance routes, the rope torn. 

Thought was no longer an option now.

The pallet was swept from underneath by currents, submerging Wendy back in the water with an impeccable strain on her arm and another bruise to her head. 

Holding onto the pallet was nothing but a death certainty so running on her desperate adrenaline alone, she used the pallet to push herself toward the right edge and hopefully grasp onto something.

Thinking had just turned to hope.

It may not sound like it in reasonable conditions, but hope is the tool which makes survival viable. The hope that there is a way out. The hope that there is a chance to make it out alive. The hope that this isn't the end. When the cognitive reason is out the door, hope is the only concept keeping the self-preservation fire alive. 

It's the gasoline that makes any insane action sound plausible to the brain.

Hence it was nothing but luck when after a gulp or two of a water swarming with decay and microorganisms Wendy wanted to know nothing about, she bumped into round rods that she quickly identified as a ladder. 

Upper muscles tensed on subconscious command. 

Her grip bruised her palms, but against the current, that was the necessary pain in order to hook her right arm on the bars going above surface and start climbing out of the sewer water, while every strain dragged her down.

"Get down!" she heard a desperate voice whisper-yelling at her just a second too late for Wendy to comprehend holding back the coughs and wailed inhales. 

They were matched from on top the platform the warning came by a rough, throaty croak, clicking. A pitched scream followed.

As much as she would have liked not to recognize it, that sound clearly belonged to a Clicker. 

Thudding steps vibrated concrete and reverbed right through the ladder she clung to, hiding her head closer to the water and further from being seen over the edge, then-

A gunshot startled the whole atmosphere of sewer, echoing into the depths of it, awakening perhaps all it hid.

The Clicker fell over the edge, over Wendy's head, and disappeared into the fast moving water that swept its body away. 

She kept back the urge to vomit in response to the thousand twists punishing her stomach into something small and frail. Trembling from every joint, Wendy hesitated leaving behind the ladder and climbing up now. 

Breath stuck in her throat in fear of any more infected waiting there.

That fear was not new and it was not unfamiliar. It came back to her with the same whiplash strength as ten years ago, each time she was faced with having to survive the brutality of the virus' shell without any sense of weapon to defend herself with. 

Hyper-awareness of her own state didn't fully help either. At least not until the gag reflex was buried in the wide-eyed realization that the ladder was creaking despite her not moving. There was a far too great chance the thing would break any second now and she'd be swept back for another swim for Wendy not to decide thoughtlessly to climb on the concrete platform.

Pinned to the wall next to a collapsed metal door covered in a last stage infected, petrified fungus spread across its wideness, was the sight of the older stranger Wendy insisted they help out of the storm. His left hand held onto a hip wound bleeding through his fingers. In his lap was a pistol probably dropped from the right hand which now waited near his face to hush her down.

Clicking sounds blared from the darkness beyond the doorframe and the audible dragging of steps across cold concrete clattered Wendy into a wide eyed immediate gulp of air closing her mouth and tensing her shoulders. 

She scattered to the side, scurrying towards the man whose name she could have sworn she heard the child call amidst all the madness with the tornado, however now, completely escaped her memory. 

Though the immediate danger was out of question, the cognitive processes returned with a tremendously strict filter between: necessary information and unimportant details. 

All that mattered to Wendy at that moment was to be beside another human and observe that unlike her, they actually still had all their gear. 

Wendy took the pistol from Joel's lap before his hand fully descended down to grasp it himself. 

Opening his mouth in immediate protest, his rough voice could only blurt out a single sound before he was met with a palm over it. Wide eyed with pistol at ready, Wendy looked not at him, but at the door next to them. Clickers responded to sound the best and though they were in a loud environment to begin with given the constant water flow next to them, any wrongly timed noisy movement could have been the death of them.

Joel leant his head back and bit her hand hard enough for the pain to have Wendy close her eyes, just about a long enough opening for Joel to simply take the pistol back from her and get ready to aim.

"I'm not trying to rob you, damn it!" Wendy whispered, not even considering backing away from the man holding the end of a barrel pointed to her chest. "I'm trying to take inventory to see how the heck we gon' get out here."

"I haven't heard that one before," Joel motioned with the gun as if his serious face hasn't been brazed by at least two grimaces since he opened his mouth towards their whispered argument. "Back off or I'll shoot."

Wendy lifted her hands, "Go ahead, please. Shoot me and call all those Clickers on the other side of this wall. How many bullets do you have left that you can waste one on a doctor who wants to help?" 

Survival does not see the distinction between a fib and blatant lie, so without any sort of filter, Wendy has chosen to use a doctoral title in a context where it might have been taken as proof that she finished medicine, not biochemistry. Sure, her specialization field covered human biology and a few core subjects of medicine tie, but did it mean she had the same knowledge level as a practicing doctor? Not in their old world. In current times? Jury's still out. 

Joel watched her with nothing but asserting coldness in his eyes. He knew all too well he didn't have that much ammo left. Not an amount that would count anyhow, if he could find a way to sit up and deal with the hip injury. Though he loathed depending on a stranger's kindness, his survival odds were slim either way, it was only a matter or whether or not he'd take a chance on getting medical help or not.

Wendy watched him lower his gun and nodded. Knowing his firearm had a capacity of most likely up to ten bullets and he already used one on the first Clicker, she felt a chill creep up her back while she asked, "How many are out there?"

"Too many," Joel's grip on his pistol was ever tighter, even though he no longer threatened her with it. "Counted at least four near the door. The water's noise is disorienting them enough not to hear us right now, but they are erratic, moving around too much because of it too."

"Shit," Wendy mumbled upon that reality, back up as a fact by the overlapping clicking sounds distantly echoing from inside the room behind them. She firmly shook her head away from that fear before it suffocated her into a paralysis which would help neither of them. "Let me see that," she demanded, grasping Joel's left wrist to lift it off the wound.

A small peek was all she was offered and fortunately it was all she needed anyhow. 

"We're going to need to clean and bandage that," Wendy announced, moving her hands up to Joel's shoulders to free him off backpack. He didn't budge, looking up at her in an expression that spoke far more through furrowed eyebrows and scorns that his words could have ever said. "Look, I get it. You don't know me. But know that I want to get out of here and my chances of seeing Pete again are close to zero if I go out there alone. We can help each other in this situation. We have a common enemy and a common goal. Don't you wanna get back to your daughter?"

Correcting Wendy on who Ellie truly was to him was hardly a priority for Joel, though the 'daughter' terminology felt like needles in his ears. He grunted, letting leaning forward as the only reply towards Wendy's abundance of words. 

Though she was a particularly talkative person, she didn't mind in the slightest this man's preference for keeping speech down to a minimum, especially not as he was finally cooperating. 

Unfortunately, the good news pretty much stopped there because his backpack gave Wendy a clear picture about what this man was all about. He had bandages, tape, supplements, alcohol, a couple rags and metal parts, but no medicine. Not even a single pain killer. 

Without judging too much on supplies otherwise rare to come by to begin with, Wendy grabbed the bandages, the roll of tape, the flask of alcohol and one rag cloth. Then, without a single glance at the rest of the weapons Joel carried, to his utmost surprise, she let the backpack down beside them and motioned him to get closer while, in an attempt to kneel and straighten her own position, she almost gasped from the pain spurring out of her still open wound on her right leg.

Joel looked down while following her wordless commands, "Can you walk with that?"

"I'll borrow a rag to tie it up and manage," Wendy brushed the concern off without hesitation, though deep down, she appreciated all too well just how badly she's going to limp. Something as small as a limp would slow her down considerably and against infected, any such weakness was tripled over in danger. 

But, remarkably so, she gave Joel every reason for him to start contouring his first opinion on this stranger that called him and Ellie out of the storm: she was naïve. 

Only ten minutes after she's started patching him, Joel was able to touch his side and feel the numbed pain coming from under a thick bandage and tape wrapped around it. Before he could even lift his eyes and ask about it, Wendy's ragged breath after having poured some alcohol over the leg wound worrying her addressed his confusion, "We need to avoid getting into direct contact with infected blood... Assuming we cannot get past the Clickers quietly enough to avoid getting physical."

"We could always go back in the water, find another way out of here. The stream must lead somewhere."

"I agree," Wendy was answering breathlessly. Her leg hasn't stopped bleeding after multiple attempts of applying pressure, so her heart was beating out of control realizing the depth of the wound and the fact that if she doesn't act fast, she may be closer to losing consciousness than standing a chance to let adrenaline help her walk. "But a door down here also means there is a way to get out through maintenance routes. Frankly, our odds are identical between drowning and getting killed by infected, I would just rather choose one whose certainty is a way out through which we are guaranteed to be able to escape. Give me the pair of scissors please."

The second she asked for the pair of scissors, Joel knew exactly what Wendy was going for. 

"I know how to tie a tourniquet," he offered that along with the scissors. 

"It's going to be hell anyhow so I would rather do it myself, so just watch the door." 

Joel didn't argue. He turned around, the best he could, feeling the uncomfortable ache from his hip, but not as prominent as before it was bandaged tightly. Shrugging his backpack on, he pointed the gun towards the open door and got ready.

Wendy prepped herself up mentally while making a broad fold of her bandage to try and not scream. She tied at first above the wound on her upper leg, placed the scissors on top the first knot and tied another on top. 

No matter how much she prepared herself for it, the second she used the scissors to wind round and tighten the tourniquet her scream was guttural and uncontrollable. 

Several screams from the other room responded as Clickers were made aware of their location.

She had to tighten up still, no matter how much it hurt, or the bleeding will not have been stopped and she would have done nothing towards getting out of there. A gunshot and a splash in the water marked a second pitched scream as she tightened the tourniquet one last time.

With a sight blurred by tears, Wendy tried to see clear enough to tie the ends of the bandage around and over the end of the scissors to fix it put. 

A second gunshot burst through the atmosphere and though that Clicker also fell in the water, before Joel could even get the chance to reload, a third one ran through the door. Joel dodged out of the range of its grip by taking a step back, however, Wendy was already on her feet, sight cleared by the height of adrenaline necessary for her to sit up straight with flaring pain spreading from her right leg.

In that brief moment, she grasped the first thing from the side of Joel's backpack that was in her way. Wendy woke up throwing the blade of a hatchet at the head of the Clicker. 

The swing itself was so imbalanced that it threw her off her stance too.

Fortunately, it was for the better that she tripped forward because that brought the Clicker down while her ironed grip remained with the hatchet. With no room for breathing, she descended the thing down on its head in a heartbeat, until there was no infected head to hit, but just a disgusting puddle of goo.

Joel's hand grasped her arm and dragged her away from the door, directing her to press her back on the wall and wait beside him in silence. 

"How many bullets you've got left?" Wendy whispered up at him.

"Three," Joel gave her blunt honesty, as bone chilling as it was. "We gotta take them out quietly, so you stay close." Looking down at her, his gaze dropped to her leg. Though the wound stopped bleeding, it was still open, "Want tape for that?"

"No, let's just get moving." 

While Wendy tried to take the lead, Joel stopped her with a palm on her shoulder, pressing her back in her place, "What happened to not getting into direct contact with infected blood?"

"I'll be careful," Wendy accentuated syllables on her words. "We don't really have time to waste, you know."

He looked away, "Fall behind and I'm leaving you here, lady." That was how little he was suppose to give a damn of her. The naïve deserved no sympathy for how dare they survive so far into this madness and still cling to that innocence of humanity that gets them to help any poor bastard? No one dumb enough to care for anyone other than their own deserved his pity... yet that did not change a fact even Joel couldn't ignore: her help sped things up for his escape.

And no matter how cold he was beside her, the second they stepped into the darkness of the room awaiting them past the wall, Wendy met the sort of man she had watched Pete turn into over the years too: experienced killer, determined, strategic, tactical. 

In the depths of her mind, watching Joel immediately take down from behind a Clicker with a pocket knife had half reminded her that missed Pete and half just whisper approval that he was right: this was a dangerous sort of stranger. 

To describe what the "room" looked like required far more light than the two of them had at their disposal. Joel's wearable flashlight was flickering and its white stream only lit patches ahead of them painting the chamber as more of a concrete hallway, long and growing narrow, than some transitional point after which their tension would end. 

There was no end to it, not a sensible one. Crunched down, stepping slowly and soundlessly ahead, slithering through far too many Clickers, that was a clear equation for pounding heartbeats, shivering jaws. 

One wrong step. One wrong step would have been their death sentence in that hallway. One wrong step would have sounded the alarm for well over a dozen infected clicking loudly both ahead and behind. 

They were doing great with advancing though. At least until Wendy grabbed Joel's arm and held him to a halt. She gestured to the mouth and nose. 

Spores. 

Joel looked up ahead and in the range of the flashlight, she squinted a sight of overgrown fungus, covering both walls, the floor and some of the ceiling. Through the considerably narrow terror corridor waiting for them ahead, visible clouds of spores awaited stagnant too. 

Wordlessly, they decided exactly what they had to do. Joel's gas mask got lost in the sewer stream while Wendy's hopefully still was in that garage, next to the vehicle her and Pete have been using. So, he gave her his gun and removed the backpack silently. 

He sat it down.

He unzipped the bag slowly.

A single mess inside of it cause one short sound that awakened one Clicker into paying attention. 

Joel froze while Wendy acted on the spot in an unexpected way: she reached out and switched off his flashlight. 

They were left in complete darkness.

Dragged steps echoed around them. Their breath fanned in close proximity.

Clicking sounds approached, the groans and croaks sounding above them. So close. Too close.

But neither of them moved. 

Wendy's hand grasped his shirt next to his flashlight and held tighter now.

The moment stretched to unbearable seconds growing into minutes of pure terror.

Joel's hand slowly lifted towards Wendy's, putting into it a gun part and taking away the pistol. 

There was no need for words. 

Blindly, Wendy threw the metallic peace back towards the direction they came from and the echo of that singular sound had Clickers running past them, hunting a metal piece. 

Joel hit his flashlight back on. 

A Clicker was just about to pass them when the flashlight alerted it of their presence.

Wendy straightened up and stepped forward, directly swinging the hatchet at the deformed, fungi overgrown head of the infected. The hatchet, already past its glory days, broke. So Joel stepped in, quite literally, pushing Wendy out of the way and stomping his foot onto the head of the fall Clicker until the blade went through. 

"Let's go," Joel tossed a ragged at Wendy and, fixing the backpack on his back once more, he started tying that rag around his nose and mouth himself, hurrying towards the worst part of their exit. 

Wendy finished tying her improvised mask only after they've stepped on the petrified fungi. Here and there, the fungi had turned to a sticky slime which bubble in patches that she would have never liked to even get close to. The amount of infection in this area was turning her stomach upside down but she stood close to Joel and they both moved fast.

Neither of them had to look back to make out that the sounds they were hearing were the hoard of Clickers catching up that they were running the opposite way. 

The fungi tunnel was growing narrower. Soon, they had to get on all four.

Hands were reaching from behind them. At any moment, Joel expected to lose Wendy to them but every time anything caught her ankle, she kicked like her life depended on it. 'Cause for all he cared, it did. 

"We're almost there," Joel shouted, seeing a door ahead, past a clearing of the fungi where concrete could be seen once more. 

Once his feet found solid ground and he could sit up straight he helped Wendy get up and bumped his shoulder to open the door. The handle wasn't working, forcing it open didn't get it to budge. Then from far behind, into the fungi tunnel, he hear something break.

"Bloater...," Wendy's wide eyes filled with pure terror at the sight of a deformed, gigantic human body completely covered in the virus' body, now breaking from the wall and groaning awake. If the Clickers couldn't make it through, this thing was already there. "Fuck!" she immediately pushed with Joel into the door to open it. 

Something was blocking it from the other side, but it slowly started budging enough to leave a small opening. 

Though deadly, Bloaters were far slower. While Wendy moved fast: the second there was an opening, she slipped through it on the other side of the door and with only a single glance at the new corridor, she started pushing at the metal drawer blocking the way. 

She didn't have to push long because soon, their combined strength gave Joel enough room to slip past the door too. They got the drawer pushed into the door at the same time, but from the other side a massive Bloater went head first into it.

"Run," Joel breathed out. 

She didn't know how she could do that limping but it didn't really matter. 

The second the Bloater broke through the defense it was either run or die and Wendy refused to die down there. 

That was in fact the core thing about survival: the plain refusal of death.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
BAM !! You cannot tell me this would have been the coolest game sequence ever goshh

I am so happy with this chapter, man I cannot even put into words...

😭 next chapter we see how Pete and Ellie dealt with things while Joel found a naive friend in Winnie