borderline - the last of us.

36. negative three.

'WAS THIS A FEDRA THING?' Ellie asked, wandering through the middle of a bunch of decaying stalls with tarps over the tops of them, the fabric torn and grey and dirty.

'No, army.' Joel informed her, looking around. 'They put these places up all around, the first few days after the outbreak. Emergency medical camps. They obviously didn't last, but they had me in one just like this. What are you doing?'

'With Sarah?' Ellie asked, ignoring Joel's question to Ralph as the shorter of the two began to duck behind a stall and rummage around behind it.

'No, she was gone already.' He added sombrely, stopping after a few feet to look at Ralph again. 'Al, what are you doing?'

'Getting medical shit, dummy.' Ralph called, crouched down behind the counter and out of sight, rustling out of sight and grabbing everything he saw until something caught his eye.

Abruptly, a tin box thumped onto the surface above his head, followed by him springing to his feet and fidgeting with the tiny, coded padlock on the front of it. 'Give me four digits.'

'Uh... Try twenty-thirty-two.' Joel proposed. Useless. He looked at Ellie.

'Three thousand.' Again, nothing happened.

'One two three four.' Lou said confidently.

The lock clicked open with a bit of force needed. Ralph tossed it to the ground and flipped the box open, excited to see what was inside. Then, it clattered to the ground when his hand shot out and smacked it away from him, shuddering as he stepped back and shoving a hand over his mouth, terrified.

In the middle of the box, the one that Ralph had just dented, was a plethora of supplies and a spider, wrapped up in cobwebs for God knew how long. It didn't seem to be alive, and how it even got in there in the first place was a mystery, but it was enough to scare the shit of out Ralph and make Joel take a tiny step away from the box.

'Okay,' Ralph shook his head, walking out from behind the counter and staring at the ground. 'No more medical shit.'

'Wuss.' Joel taunted, patting him on the arm regardless. In return, Ralph gave him a fully charged shove and made him stumble out of the way of their path.

'What was wrong with you?' Lou pestered him, ignoring them and their strange ways of flirting.

'Oh, it was, uh... It was for this.' Joel leaned down towards her, pressing a finger to his temple to highlight a small chunk of missing skin with a white scar on top of it, practically unnoticeable. Ralph had noticed it their first night in the city, and Joel had brought it up to Ellie during passing conversation, leaving Lou to be the only one in the dark about it due to their lack of conversations.

He had never explained how it happened.

'The guy who shot and missed.' Ellie nodded, the memory coming back to her when she added to her sentence. 'I figured that would've happened later.'

'Nope.' Joel's voice grew quieter as he went on, heavy with caution. 'Second day.'

Ralph took a sudden detour, hiking his foot up on a wall of cinderblock to tie the laces of his right shoe. Joel decided to wait on him, taking a seat next to his combat boot and tapping his foot on the ground anxiously.

'Well, I gotta hand it to the army people.' Ellie laughed, continuing to trek ahead of them and not giving any consideration to the fact that her main sources of protection were ten or fifteen steps away and that Lou was beginning to slow down as well. 'They were way better at stitching you up than we were. Am I right, Zhenyas?'