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📻 — CHAPTER FOUR ..
' on the road again '

JOURNAL ENTRY

          Toxin Ver. C23.4
          Test Subject:    Stage 2 Infected
          Location:    Halbur, Carroll, Iowa
          Time:    aprox. 70s
          Dosage:   3mL (increased adenosine by 0,1)

          Process:    Clean-up procedures for temporary base town winded up awakening the infected in the area. The test subject was singled out. The injection was administrated intramuscularly, upper left arm. Initial reaction of the test subject was a sense of locomotor imbalance whilst involuntary violent instinct proceeded to control. Ten seconds after administration, the toxin started burning the Cordycepin and the test subject started exhibiting physical self-preservation tendency (grappling place of the injection, hitting overgrown fungi formations on head, scratching the neck area etc.). The adenosine was insufficient and tissue begun suffering visible third degree burns within twenty seconds from administration. The test subject entered the previously documented seizure phase within twenty-five seconds from administration. Body spasms culminate with foamed coughs. Within forty seconds from administration, eyes begin to bleed; visible fruiting body of the Cordyceps begins to decay; breathing instinct is terminated and the brain itself starts being sanitized. 

          Notes:    I can feel how close we are to a cure. If I could only have the proper lab facilities... I could replicate what's happening in my own body easier. 

After the tornado incident, down in the sewers with Joel, I had an open wound exposed to Cordyceps spores. The whole area was contaminated and my wound came in direct contact with it. 

Didn't tell Pete about this, as he still refuses I test the limits of my immunity for the sake of this research, but I should have been long gone by now if my immunity wasn't the real deal. 

My leg is healing. I had a mild fever when we left Halbur, but one hour into the drive and I already felt better. It's painful... knowing the solution is in me, but I don't have the right means to replicate it yet. We are making progress, but it feels too slow. 

I took a blood sample before we left and I will compare it with a blood sample taken on arrival. It's surreal. Next time I am writing here, I will be across an ocean.

📻

          IF YOU STRAYED FROM BIG CITIES and crammed mapped roads, America still looked almost normal from time to time. They didn't bomb the fields, back when they approved that approach; where there was once scarce life to begin with, there would later be few infected wondering about aimlessly. 

On these unmarked roads where fires did not purge and too few bastards have managed to get themselves stuck or into trouble, the loneliness took over in a particularly still ambience. Nature has taken over of both sides of the path their car was dragged through at a legal speed. 

Monochrome crop fields were changed to a painting playing myriads of colors tainted in yellow, dancing in the breeze of a humid air walked underneath a pale blue sky. The radio played an old cassette with the sort of country music that wrapped around a saturated nature and shaped illusions out of the heat. Their best illusion was to made feel those most naïve, even if just for a short drive, that this was nothing but a holiday trip. 

Air conditioning was a luxury now, so all the windows were down and Johnny Cash sounded just a little drunker over a conversation that sparked liveliness over the initial tensions.

Wendy's journal closed and warmed in her lap while she sat with her feet tucked under herself and her body turned so that the back of her head wearing an old and dusty beanie could at any time lean back and exit through the window to glimpse at the sky. 

However, she preferred that posture in order to look at everyone. From there, she could look straight ahead at Pete and his concentrated features as he drove through the constant paranoia that these strangers would pause a danger at any time. Half of him, she was aware, was gad that she stood the way she did, because the second benefit of this position was, of course, the fact that she could look at both Joel and Ellie with little effort but full visibility. 

"Are we really going to see a working plane?" Ellie exclaimed, excitedly bouncing on the middle of the backseat the second Wendy had calmly told her their current destination was the Fairmont State Airfield, from where they would part ways as her and Pete change the means of transport.

"That's the plan," Wendy confirmed with an amused nod.

"How does that even work?" Ellie leant back and threw Joel a look filled with wonderous disbelief before giving into her restlessness and leaning forward again. "Like, I thought planes were all... gone."

"It's not that big of a plane," Pete commented in, absently. Though his main worries circulated between driving safely, following anything else but the marked routes on the map half unfolded in his lap, and looking in the rear mirror fixed on Joel, just so he may calm his crippling paranoia before his hands' grip tore off the steering wheel completely, that did not mean Pete was unable to pay attention to the occasional silliness of the conversations Wendy was carefully having with Ellie. 

"The bigger airports have been considered the seed-plots of the CBI threat's spread, but Fairmont is one of the relatively small ones. Our contact, however, is supposedly ex-military. Deserted during the first wave of the outbreak the second he received the orders to shoot out of the sky the public airline flights entering American air space."

"Wow," Ellie narrowed her eyebrows down, "why were they shooting the planes down?"

"That first day erupted everywhere in the world," Wendy gestured with her right hand. "There were food poisoning cases proving to be CBI everywhere. Harbor surrounding areas infected through spores."

"They were scared more sick people would fly in," Pete summarized.

"And you know all this how?" Joel inquired with a strong dosage of cynicism. 

 "News," Wendy shrugged. "Before the breakout and after the breakout. If you knew what lines to listen to, you got a lot more information than most in the first months."

"So this military guy...," Ellie stirred the conversation back at what had irked her curiosity.

"Where did you find him?" Joel asked, as he did not mind much in what direction his questions went as long as he would be able to find out more about these two survivors.

"He was recommended to us by an... acquaintance," Pete took over answering that part. Knowing how bad Wendy was at lying, taking it upon himself to deliver the obvious taint of the truth was only decent; less decent was the tingle on his knuckles which remembered the blood they left behind on the face of the 'acquaintance', just a FEDRA soldier they had proof might know of smuggling routes off-continent.

"He was a smuggler for a while after deserting the military," Wendy stuck to her selective sincerity. "Made several flights to Europe and after contacting him, he agreed to smuggle us across the Atlantic, given that we provide the fuel to last us to the Greenland refuel."

"That doesn't sound like a thorough payment," Joel murmured.

"Well, he's not leaving us in Denmark," Pete explained the apparent cheap price of such a smuggling operation. "He's got trade in Ireland. From there, we have to find a way to cross the North Sea on our own."

"Is it as bad out there as it is here?" Ellie inquired, having heard, for the first time since forever, an abundance of other countries being mentioned in a single conversation. Nationalism was no longer a choice, but rather the only thing anyone had left, because the idea of ever leaving America was reduced to an unrealistic dream to everyone... up to this very moment when her mind was open to the possibility that perhaps there was a side of the world that hasn't been torn to shreds by the cruelty of the virus. Maybe other countries have been better at handling the infected. 

That shimmer of hope got snuffed out with considerable guilt by Wendy's gradual sigh and slow nod. "I talk with my... family in Denmark through the radio and I can't speak for the whole world, but I know back home is just as bad. The big cities have been bombed. The quarantine zones are borderline communist. Refugees, looters, murderous factions. Gen said Denmark still has working boats, DEMA controlled."

"DEMA?"

"Their FEDRA," Pete sneaked in the explanation.

"And you think everywhere is like that?" Ellie's hopelessness corrupted her tone.

"I don't think so, I know so," Wendy crossed her arms at her chest. "I'm a doctor, Ellie. I've studied the mutated Cordyceps since the first year of the outbreak."

"Wait," Ellie straightened up, "you're a doctor?" 

Her shock this time seemed different. It sounded different. It sounded as if this time around it wasn't the childish curiosity driving her to exclaim, but an inner turmoil, a hidden goal that Pete and Wendy could only theorize about. 

Joel knew though, hence he cleared his throat a little louder in hopes of shutting her up.

Silence built up on both fronts, because while Joel wanted to protect the reason he was smuggling Ellie, Pete sensed the stranger's tension and felt danger around Wendy's status. Doctors were invaluable to the pseudo-society they lived in now. But invaluable resources deserved unspeakable violence and injustice in order to be claimed. He's seen the extent of madness to which the survivors are willing to go.

His iron grip on the steering wheel convinced Wendy in silence to not continue onto this topic and give him a chance to probe the waters from there on. "Why are you heading west again?" Pete asked into the rear mirror, meeting Joel's eyes. 

"We're visiting my brother," Joel answered brief and cold. 

"Really?" Pete nodded. "'Cause the little one said you owed her something." The sarcastic venom of his tone earned him a burning look from Wendy right into the side of his face, compelling Pete wordlessly to move his right hand off the gear and land it on her knee in a form of reassurance that he was careful with his poking. 

"Did she now?" Joel played it off with a careless attitude, though he did look down at Ellie incriminatory. 

"Where are you from?" Wendy blurted out a question she hoped would unclog the atmosphere. Truth was, it's been a truly long time since she had the chance to talk with anyone other than Pete. Though she loved him dearly, humans haven't been made to exist in isolated pairs since the Garden of Eden, and then of course, there was no doubt that looking at Ellie irrevocably reminded Wendy of Mira. 

It almost had an aura of fate to it; the sort that shouldn't get ignored no matter how tedious it would get to ask mundane questions. This time next week she might be reunited with her sister at last, after ten years of listening through a damn radio, counting beats and trying to imagine, in their deciphering, how Mira's voice might sound. 

Though Wendy hated to admit it, she has long forgotten her sister's voice. 

She could only vaguely remember her face and she was well aware that in these ten years, her little bug has grown and matured; that terrible grip often made her shiver because what if she won't recognize her own sister when they meet? What if Mira won't remember her either? 

Distracting herself with Ellie was easy, because when there were no memories left clear enough to contour the image of her sister, any child would do to fill the void. The association was surprisingly easy to maintain too, because questions started flowing naturally until they discussed their favorite places seen: Wendy since Texas and Ellie since Boston.

Turns out Wendy had had quite a few memories made with Pete to share, showing Ellie, to Pete's distress, the pictures they took. 'We lost the camera recently,' Wendy would explain, only for Pete to interrupt. 'By lost, she means we ran out of film and had to throw it away.' 

Their back-and-forths did nothing but reinforce what the pictures showed both Ellie and Joel: a young couple whose love somehow didn't rot in the decay of the world. 

Then there were Ellie's favorite places: a rooftop in Boston, some boobytrapped town and a mall. It was the mall mention which sparked the conversation that took up the whole last hour of the drive to Fairmont.

"... the whole place was lit up and it was the most beautiful thing I've every seen," Ellie talked, head leant back on her seat and staring at the ceiling of the car. "To think the whole city could have been like that, but the motherfuckers just didn't let us have electricity."

"Easy with the foul language...," Joel mumbled along, looking out the window and mostly trying to tune out what the girls were talking about. 

"Didn't let you have electricity?" Wendy repeated slowly.

"Yeah," Ellie nodded straightening up to look at her. Quite obviously, she ignored Joel's comment and, while sliding her hands under her thighs to warm them, she reinforced her opinion, "FEDRA purposefully kept us in the dark so we are dependent on their stupid power generators."

"Oh boy...," Pete sigh, knowing damn well what was coming the second Wendy readjusted herself in her seat.

"Ellie," Wendy begun swiftly though she immediately paused to ponder on her wording. "Did FEDRA ever hold any science related classes in their QZ schools?"

"Well...," Ellie was slightly stunned with the question. "We learnt geography. Sort of. It was a mostly military school-"

"Of course," Wendy puffed, throwing a look towards Pete. "How do they expect humanity to stand a chance if they are not teaching this new generation the means to better the world?"

"They are prioritizing survival...?" Ellie spoke uncertain.

"Yes," Wendy grimaced, "the survival of the individual. Not of the species. Which is horrendous because an uneducated people is bound to self-destruct, because they will grow to hold biased and false opinions over concrete facts."

"Okay...," Ellie leant back, eyes wide. She didn't quite expect Wendy, who has been rather calm and friendly since the storm, to rile up and express so many deeply hidden frustrations out of the blue. "Was it something I said?" the child tilted her head to the side, at which point, Wendy was reminded that Ellie was not to blame for the flawed judgement of those in charge. 

"Sorry," Wendy blurted out her apology.

"Winnie used to teach at one of the quarantine zones we stopped by for a while back a couple years ago," Pete explained much calmer to Ellie. Finally, he turned his head to glance at the child and whisper for the sake of humor, "She's a science nerd."

Wendy placed a finger on his cheek to push him to look back at the road. "Point is, malls work on backup power generators that can last up to four thousand hours of use. Most shopping centers have been stripped of their generators and the machines have been installed to power quarantine zones or military bases. The whole power grid of America is down though because there are no more power plants producing for it. We truly are dependent on those generators on fuel. And you know why? 'Cause no one's qualified to administer a power plant anymore."

"Power plant...," Ellie repeated with a slow nod, inviting Wendy to detail her surprisingly vast knowledge regarding power plants. Pete has been right on his part: Wendy has always been a nerd. And that came as a skill of great usefulness the second she became an older sister to Mira. 

What Ellie managed to give Wendy in that car was not just the chance to talk, which bottom line was something that Pete provided a satisfactory amount as he loved to learn anything she could teach him out of the blue when neither of them had any sleep. No, Ellie gifted Wendy so much more. 

She gave her back a vivid memory of sitting down on the floor of a bright bedroom with pink curtains that separated their space from a balcony overlooking a distant, faraway harbor occasionally blasting the goodbye of a ship from the shores of their country. Two giant heart shaped pillows, one red and one pink. A stack of short encyclopedias. The scent of her baby sister, clingy, wide eyed and curious, marveled at how words sounded being read from a book. 

Wendy could almost see her little finger trail over pictures; though she could not hear her voice anymore, she imagined it and knew Mira was asking questions, dismantling each fact with a thirst for knowing more, not because she was interested in those books or the fields they discussed, but because her sister was the one reading. How could Wendy not wish to have all the answers in the world simply so she could see her sister's wonder in full spring of shimmers?

And though the memory was warmed in a veil of innocent joy, a certain sadness clung to its edges, gloomed over Wendy's heart and deepened her fear. Now she was closer than she's ever been to finally crossing the ocean and the nervousness was getting so out of control that there was no need for words so that Pete could understand. 

One look was enough. 

He's known since the talk about power plants, he's confirmed it through observing how spaced out Wendy looked throughout helping him unload the trunk of the car in front of Fairmont Airfield's hangar, but really, he could only address it once they started walking around the building and toward the runaway behind it. 

Ellie and Joel volunteered to help them carry their fragile "stuff" to the plane, so they were trailing just a few meters behind them. Apart from the plastic canisters for fuel, everything else related to Wendy's research was stored in a bunch of opaque plastic boxes with handles, the sort of aspect which Joel, who still though Wendy was a doctor, couldn't really question, but Ellie, was convinced they were transporting explosives, starting doubting the contents. 

Pete finally sighed whilst the hangar was still to their left. "You're going to see Mira soon, don't worry." He carried two of the fuel recipients filled to the brim, both of which he could drop at any time to grab the pistol visibly strapped to his belt. Even then, after months of preparation to the deal with this guy, his paranoia made him be careful, precocious. 

"I know," Wendy whispered back to him. "I just miss her so much and I'm usually rather good at forgetting about it. Between our survival and my research, there's not much time left to weep about. But..." She hesitated, bowing her head rather embarrassed with how such a silly thing already stung her eyes. Wendy carried two of the white boxes, the two she knew were the most valuable: the samples with the notebooks and the small microfluidizer she scrapped together. 

"You've just got a soft spot for children," Pete chuckled, just vaguely allowing himself to remember the calmer times when he needn't no proof of Wendy's ways with children in order to dream that one day they would settle down together and have a family of their own. "There's nothing wrong with that."

Going around the hangar had them wind up on the runaway which, like the whole airfield was quiet. One old and slightly rusted Cessna waited nearby the open exit of the hangar but though the doors were open, there wasn't a single movement. 

"Woah," Ellie exclaimed at the sight of the small plane. 

Wendy looked back over her shoulder, "Are we adding this to the list of cool things you've seen on your road trip?"

"Definitely," Ellie showed a toothy smile immediately, rushing ahead to the plane. She left the one box she carried carefully on the ground beside it and peaked inside.

"Set the stuff inside the plane, I'll go take a look in the hangar," Pete nodded towards Wendy and left the fuel down to stretch a little and seek their pilot. Wordlessly, Joel left the two boxes besides the fuel and went with Pete, however his presence did not go unnoticed and in the shadow of the hangar, with Wendy no longer in hearing range, Pete audibly scoffed. "I don't need a bodyguard."

"The car keys are still with you," Joel bluntly justified his presence and even his help with their luggage. He wasn't stupid nor dense: he knew that, unlike Wendy, Pete was not naïve enough to give up such an asset to just anyone. Now it wasn't just the car Joel needed, but also his weapons, locked in it. 

Wendy joined beside Ellie, freeing her hands and getting them on her hips with a sigh. "Wanna take a look inside?"

"Hell yeah!"

Ellie climbed in at the cue of Wendy's offer but as soon as she took a single step inside, she slipped and fell on her back. 

"Careful," Wendy flinched.

Clumsiness was not exactly something that has ever been allowed to define Ellie in her strict orphanage upbringing, so the girl was stunned with herself... at least until she sat up and glared towards the floor, where blood was staring back at her. She lifted her eyes towards the right, inside the plane and-

Wendy saw but a glimpse at Ellie's bloodstained hands as the child screamed a curse and backed away from the sight of an infected whose guts have been spread all over the ground, but she already grasped the sleeve of the child and dragged her out of the plane. A short glimpse inside has set in stone the painful appreciation: this deal has been compromised. 

Panic has taken over her actions within the second: Wendy dropped to her knees and opened one of her white boxes, grasping a syringe from amongst the samples and notebooks that Ellie caught sight of; she felt her heart clench. The label on the syringe said 'C37.9'. It was the sort of asset that she kept close to her for emergencies only... emergencies like an ambush or getting jumped by infected. 

Without a single hesitation, forgetting about Ellie even being there but transmitting through her erratic movements anyhow that everything was going to shit, Wendy got up and ran towards the hangar. Her hand locked on the syringe, she ran ahead, looking at both sides, praying to whatever God was still watching over this mess that she was wrong, that her gut instinct and on-spot assessment was far off and that their pilot was not infected, that this location has not been compromised and that, above all, Pete didn't run right into the danger. 

This was the sort of moment when Wendy would have given anything to not be right. 

But then again... she didn't have much to trade for such a blessing.

She ran right to the end of the hangar, blood bumping in her ears and deafening her in the height of adrenaline triggered too early, when a Runner bumped into her and the scene revealed itself. Runners were rather easy kills if taken separately. But in groups... they were a pest. And there was about five of them, with four more petrified into the fungi grown on the wall. 

Wendy fell back and a gunshot rippled the air, blowing a hole through that Runner's head. She closed her eyes and pushed the dead body off of her. A second gunshot had her open her eyes: Pete stepped over the body of a Runner he's been choking out until Wendy showed up and now blew the head off of the infected attacking Joel. 

At least the one he saw.

Pete shot the next infected coming for him but did not see Joel get grabbed. With his bare fists, Joel smashed his knuckles into their forehead, then wrapped his hands around their neck. 

The  infected wriggled, screamed, made Joel force it to the ground where his hand broke the neck at last. The louder crack came however from the wall to his left: an infected broke out of the petrified fungi and collapsed onto Joel. 

They rolled on the ground.

A gunshot. 

A scream of pain from Joel. One of terror from Ellie who was grabbed to a stop by Pete from approaching.

Pete missed the infected and hit Joel instead, through the darkness and all that mess. One deep braze was enough to leave a weak opening in Joel's defense, which is what caused its scream. 

His ears rang and his heart raced, not because the pain was unfamiliar, but because he knew what meant the second he felt those rotten teeth sink into his upper arm. He knew too well what this was and it didn't matter anymore if the infected got shot off of him, if he crawled backward from the wall. Joel Miller felt the warmth in his veins, felt the blur of his sight, the taste of blood in his throat, the waves of fevers crossing his body and knotting his stomach.

A second pinch of pain focused him out of his panic and he looked down to realize a needle has been shoved into his arm, right above the bite mark. 

"It's okay," Wendy's voice urged him to look up at her face. "You're going to be okay."

Sound blasted around Joel through Ellie's scream of denial. Joel wanted to turn around, to look at her one last time before he'd ask for a bullet rather than whatever Wendy thought she was doing to him; his whole arm burned behind the exit of the needle.

"Oh no, you don't." Turning around, Joel was met with the hit of Pete's pistol grip, knocking light out of him and pulsing him to darkness. 

If it was really a second or an eternity through feverish dreams and pains, Joel couldn't tell. All he knew was that he was bitten, that he saw his life flash before his eyes, he felt his heart clench and his mind try to replay every memory he wished to cling to in order to fight the infection. He knew he saw Sarah. He heard her. Her and the ticking of a clock. 

Neither her nor the clock where there when he opened his eyes and blinked slowly to the roof of a tent. The air was brisk, different. But he wasn't.

Flinching to the side, breathing pattern suddenly quickening, he almost ripped off the bandage wrapped around his arm only to reveal the faint marks of what was once a bite from an infected. It was almost completely healed. 

He didn't understand.

How could this be? 

It didn't take him long to assume that this must be a dream, so naturally, he sat up and looked around the tent, squinting through a vertigo of his mind, unbeknownst just awakened from a whole day of being completely out of it.

A notebook laid beside him, amongst some rolls of bandage and next to a bowl of water with a cloth in it. He recognized it as the notebook in which Wendy scribbled during the first hour of the drive to Fairmont, so he picked it up and flicked to its last entry.

JOURNAL ENTRY

          Cure Ver. C37.9
          Test Subject:    Joel (human, post-infection)
          Location:    Fairmont, Nebraska
          Dosage:    1mL 
          Result:    Patient samples clean. Infection has been averted successfully. Awaiting patient recovery.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:   
And curtain falls– act 1 ends heree.

   1) apologies this chapter took so long to get out, I have been having a couple tough days lately ngl.

   2) the memory with winnie reading to mira from encyclopedias is inspired by me and my little sister entirely

   3) GIVE ME YOUR THEORIES & thoughts cause yeppp, that just happened to Joel. He got infected and cured 👀👀👀👀 thoughts? Why do you think Winnie is still working on a cure of Joel was technically just cured by her?