Joel Miller x Reader

Forty-Seven

After what felt like an eternity, a cold breeze swept through the rooms.

Dim sunlight illuminated the building, drawing a long escape route onto the floor. A few normal plants stretched their blossoms towards the warmth which seemed to be a rare sight down here.

The cool yet fresh touch felt like heaven on your dried out skin. With a relived sign you closed your eyes and took a deep breath in.

The wind let its soft fingers stroke over your skin and danced through the messy and bloody strands of your (H/C) hair that stuck to your sweat covered forehead.

Coughing and gasping, you braced yourself against the overgrown door to open the crack wider.

The tracks in the dust told you that someone must have used this very exit not long ago. On that moment you wondered how Joel had made it past the fungi.

Maybe he had found a way around it. Maybe he got infected. But at the same time you were not strong enough to think about it anymore.

The footprints led over the debris of a bridge, under the destroyed roof of the building and to the shore of the lake.

A gasp escaped your lips as you lay down on the ground and let your hand dangle into the cool water. Small waves appeared, in which the green spores spread out to draw pictures.

Your mind was tired. And your body even more so.

There was no warmth left inside your limbs. Everything shivered. It felt like a layer of ice was tightly wrapped around your body and squeezed the last bit of will to live out of you.

Your eyes jumped across the lake. Between the brown of the trees and the white of the snow something moved. At first you believed it to be an animal, a deer or a fox.

But the shadow was walking on two legs, with a head attached to his shoulders. The figure moved a few times, seemed to look for something.

Squinting your eyes, you tried to identify the person. It was important to know if they were friend or foe. Either way, it would have been better to avoid them completely.

But as they turned away to disappear between the trees you still couldn't tell who it was.

Ponderously you pulled yourself up and let yourself fall over the edge as voices of the pursuers sounded.

The water welcomed you with a soft, cold embrace. It was a wonder that it felt colder than your body temperature, which was already rapidly decreasing.

Bubbles rose to the top. The light from above got caught in them, creating little rainbows that danced inside like fireflies trapped in a glass.

Your half-closed eyes followed them through the dark until the misshapen spheres got caught in the light and shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.

For a moment you closed your eyes and thought about what it would be like never to reappear. Everything was light all of a sudden. The pressure on your skull faded.

The pain felt like a blurry memory In the back of your head.

The world felt heavy yet it felt like this weight was the one and only thing that kept you alive in that very moment. Everything was so infinitely heavy, forged of iron and steel, pressing down on your chest.

As if hands warped around you, your body sunk deeper. Darkness threatened to swallow you.

Fine threads of blood rose from your body, dancing with the movements of the water as if to mock the life that was still inside you. Enchanted, you let your hands cut through those lines of red and created more lines, that went on to form more threads.

Time seemed to stop for a moment. The sounds of the water filled the world. Everything was drowning.

You included.

For a long, dangerous moment, you let yourself sink even further. There wasn't a single thought on your mind. You wanted to feel something, even if it was just this desperate panic to avoid drowning.

Only when the decreasing air in your lungs began to burn did you open your eyes and fought your way back to the surface. With your head pulled in you swam under some debris to gasp for air unnoticed.

The sounds that reached your ears were dull, suppressed. For a moment you felt like a bubble was wrapped around your head.

The coldness of the water pulled you back to reality. Your eyes jumped over the landscape.

In the distance, you believed to hear the engine of a car. Strange, that definitely had not been there before. But whoever's car this was, it had to be a way out.

Frowning, you narrowed your eyes and tried to spot something between the trees.

"Joel?", you gasped. "Are you... still here?"

But before you could move, the barking of dogs sounded.
Struck by surprise, you pulled your head back and pressed yourself into the shadows.

Above your head, dogs appeared. With their snorts raised in the air they tried to pick up your scent.

You held your breath. One of them even came so close that you could spot the colour of its fur from the corner of your eyes.

But before the dog could spot you, somebody chased it away, impatient.

"Where is that fucker?!", that was Owen's voice.

How did he had managed to catch up so fast?

And more importantly, how much luck did he have to survive the fungi?

It was a wonder that he was still walking with a wound between his ribs and a possible infection. At least it seemed quite possible that he was infected.

There was no way in hell that he had made it out in time before breathing the spores in. Either that or he was more of a lucky bastards than people that survived being struck by lightning.

His men agreed, humming and began to search the area. Their steps filled your ears, way too many to fight against.

Your body began to shiver, effected by the low temperature of the water.

As your eyes watched your own reflection on the surface of the sea, you swallowed hard.

There was no other way.

You had to dive through the lake to get to the other side.
Otherwise you were dead for sure.