Silver ||Joel Miller||

you remember horror movies, right?

LAURA

They'd driven for hours, and the novelty of being in a car had worn off for Laura. Road trips hadn't been her favourite way to holiday back when the world was normal, and she had just remembered why.

Her back ached from sitting for hours and hours on end. She was exhausted from having to pay attention to the road since she and Joel had agreed that going as fast as they were comfortable going was a good idea. And just to top all of that off, Joel had uncomfortably bounced between responsive and unresponsive to her.

Everything that happened that morning before they got into the car must have been a dream, because the Joel in the car right now was not that same person. Was he more open than he'd been yesterday? Definitely. But he no longer played along with her like he had. It was possible that he'd just over thought himself into a dark corner during the drive, but she was determined to not let him put a dampener on her mood. Or, at least, she had been determined, because right now they were doing the one thing she had mentioned not wanting to do.

They were pulling up towards Kansas City.

"I thought I said we should avoid Kansas." It wasn't a question, because she'd known that she had mentioned it about one and a half hours ago when Joel took over driving again. After seeing a sign mentioning the distance to the city, she'd remembered some of the information she'd overheard while in the school back at Boston.

Kansas City stopped responding to comms just a day before they'd left, and she had no wish whatsoever to find out why.

"Going through will be faster," Joel replied, as if it was something she cared about.

"Not if we die in there, it won't be," she argued, and Ellie jolted awake in the back seat. She'd fallen asleep soon after one of those conflicting moments from Joel, when he'd opened up about his brother and why he was going to find him. It hadn't lasted long, not when he'd looked over at her and drove the point home that both she and Ellie were cargo and nothing more.

"What's going on?" Ellie asked as Joel slowed the car down. It had taken too long for Laura to notice how close they were to the city because she'd had her nose stuck in her book. She regretted the decision to bring the damned thing along in the first place. They were just outside the city, and they had come across a wonderful blockade of cars and trucks underneath an overpass.

"Joel didn't listen to me, that's what," Laura replied as the car came to a stop.

"I'm going to have a look around, see if there's a way through. Stay in the car." Joel took the rifle as he spoke.

He couldn't be serious. "You're not getting out of this car." Laura's instruction seemed pretty simple and reasonable. Who knew what or who else was out there? "You remember horror movies, right?" she asked, and his eyes briefly locked on hers before he jumped out of the car, anyway. "I'll take that as a god-damned no!" She shouted after him.

"Horror movies?" Ellie asked as they watched Joel walk through the cars. God, her heart was in her fucking throat.

"Movies made specifically to scare you. There was always a part in them when a character would do something absolutely fucking stupid and get themselves killed by whatever the bad guy or thing was," she explained.

"And you'd watch that stuff?" Ellie asked, confused. She didn't blame the kid, because it didn't really make sense unless you'd watched one of them.

"Well, I preferred psychological thrillers over horror movies, but I think you might actually like them." The more Laura thought about it, the more it made sense to her. Ellie had grown up in what was essentially a horror movie; the kid would have to find it entertaining, at the very least.