The Last Of Us: Summon, Scavenge, Survive

Author here - probably my favourite chapter so far ngl, also dont worry he wont stay 11 for ever, give it till like chapter 17 then things will speed up. Also remember he was born 2016 (specifically february 23rd) Its now 2027 and main TLOU story starts 2033, when he is like 17. The story will probably continue to even past part 2, maybe.

We'd avoided the left storage wing for a reason.

It wasn't haunted or cursed, probably. But it had a vibe. Like a place that hadn't been touched since the outbreak started, and maybe not even then. A few of us had wandered through during the early weeks. Glanced around. Noted the collapsed shelves, scorched walls, the smell of mildew and copper, then quietly turned around and decided that side of the warehouse could stay exactly how it was: forgotten, sometimes dragging an odd crate or two or just wandering around.

But after the Joel scare and weeks of trying to fit twenty people's worth of crap into one functional loading bay filled to the brim with crates, lockers and other shit, something had to give.

So here we were. Me, Lia, Cole, Rusty, Donny, and a all the summons standing in a half-lit room littered with old shelving units and damp footprints that definitely weren't mine.

"It smells like rust and bad decisions," I muttered, clicking on my flashlight.

Rusty grunted. "More mold than rust. But yeah."

The ceiling was lower here, sloped with exposed beams and cracked insulation. Broken crate lids were scattered everywhere, and half the floor looked like it had been chewed on by termites with anger issues.

Cole did a sweep with his knife drawn, not saying anything, but his body language was all business.

"I still don't like this place," Lia said quietly beside me. "Feels… wrong."

"It's ugly and cursed," I agreed. "Perfect fit."

We split into small teams. No one wandered off alone, that was rule-adjacent by now. Rusty and Donny started shoving shelves back into place. I took a group to assess the back corner, which had partially collapsed around a wall of dented filing cabinets.

At first glance, nothing jumped out. No obvious FEDRA tags. No weapon racks. Just the usual mix of destroyed pallets, broken crates, and boxes stuffed with whatever people used to think was important before the world got fanged.

But something felt off.

The labelling. The spacing. Even the layout. It wasn't uniform, like the other side. No chain of custody tags. No standard-issue supply crates. Most of the boxes were mismatched, some looked like they came from businesses, others were stenciled with old government agency acronyms that didn't scream "military."

"What even was this side used for?" Donny asked, wiping his hands on his shirt after nearly slicing a finger open on a bent bracket.

"Storage," Rusty said dryly. "Like everything else."

"No, but it's different," Lia said, crouching next to a crate that had been bolted shut and labeled in neat block lettering:

"DEPT. OF INTERIOR – PROPERTY CONTROL"

"Fed office junk?" I guessed.

"Government, but not FEDRA," she said. "Old agencies. Before martial law."

I frowned, letting my eyes scan the ceiling again. One of the support struts was bent inward not from weight, but pressure. Something had hit it hard, and not recently.

I took out my chalk and marked the corner.

"We catalog this room tomorrow," I said. "Start pulling crates now, but no opening until we're sure they're stable."

Cole raised an eyebrow but nodded. "Want it sectioned?"

"Yeah. Tag each quadrant. If anything buzzes, leaks, or glows or god forbid makes human like noise, we close it, bury it, weld it and leave a warning."

Donny nodded and scribbled something on a torn cardboard scrap. Probably spelled "Warning" wrong, but points for effort.

We spent the next hour rearranging rubble, moving crates into piles, clearing broken wood and shoving the trash against the far wall. The deeper we went, the more obvious it became: this wasn't normal supply overflow. This was stuff someone wanted buried, out of sight, out of rotation.

The first crate we opened coughed dust into our faces like it was angry at being forgotten. Donny started chocking on the dust like one of those cats that tried coughing out a furball, hunched back going up and down and all.

Lia waved the air clear and leaned in first, flashlight beaming over the contents. "Huh. Office crap."

She wasn't wrong, inside were three neat rows of sealed file folders, bundled in water-resistant wraps. I reached in and flipped one open. Typed documents. Agency letterheads. None of it recent.

"Department of Energy," I read aloud, then squinted. "Memo about facility evacuation protocols. Dated 2002."

Donny tilted his head. "So… not useful?"

Cole snorted. "Not unless you're fighting clickers with bureaucracy."

We moved on. Next crate, heavier. Took both Rusty and Cole to pop it open with a metal bar and a bit of swearing.

This one was better.

Stacked metal containers. Not ammo cans, thinner, civilian-styled. Each marked with chemical safety tags and a faded barcode.

Lia pulled one out and read the side. "Reagent Kits. Industrial grade. Might be salvageable."

"Put it on the Maybe-Doesn't-Kill-Us pile," I said, pointing to the cleared corner.

We kept working. Crate after crate. The theme held: old civilian government and business supplies.

FEMA-branded ration tins (expired but still sealed).

Weather-monitoring equipment.

Water testing strips by the hundred.

One crate even held unopened satellite phone casings, just the shells, no guts.

Cole crouched beside a sturdier box with rusted hinges. "This one's military. Not FEDRA."

I stepped over, reading the faint print across the top.

USMC — LOGISTICS STAGING (CONFIDENTIAL)

"Marine Corps," I muttered.

"Pre-FEDRA?" Lia asked.

"Definitely," Rusty said. "Before the zones. Before chain-of-command imploded."

We opened it.

Inside: sealed bags of medical gauze, tactical tourniquets, and freeze-dried meal packs stamped with dates from early 2013.

No fungus. No blood. Just time.

For a second, no one moved.

This was the kind of stuff you didn't just toss in a junk wing. This was useful. Or it had been.

"Why store this out here?" I said aloud, mostly to myself. "This isn't overflow. This is off-record."

Lia looked at me, brow furrowed. "You thinking this was a dump site?"

"No. A stash."

That's when we heard it.

Thud.

Not loud. Not close. But wrong.

The kind of sound that makes the back of your teeth itch.

Everyone went still.

Then—Thud.

Heavier. Metallic. A hard slam against something thick. A door. A wall.

The air changed.

Cole stood slowly, hand going to his knife.

Rusty backed up from the crate he'd been working on, expression darkening.

Lia didn't speak, she just turned toward the door that lead to the main room.

Thud.

Harder. Faster.

Then… silence.

Nothing.

Not even breathing.

I didn't move. Not yet. Not until I could think straight.

Because that wasn't a rat. And it wasn't the pipes.

That was something that wanted out, or in.

Going back in time

Clara tapped twice on the corner beam, soft, sharp, and deliberate.

Roy heard it from the rear bunk space, where he'd been pretending to sort salvage wires. Jules was already halfway across the main hall, moving like a shadow through blind spots they'd studied for weeks.

They didn't say a word.

They didn't need to.

This was the moment.

The plan was simple.Wait until the group was distracted, cleaning or organizing the left wing, too far to notice.Slip back. Retrieve the tools. Finish what they started.

The bolts had been loosened for days. Clara had unscrewed the last two last night while Donny had been loudly monologuing about how screwdrivers were "just pointy twisty knives." No one noticed.

They'd used chalk to mark crate routes, whispered during watch rotations, made sure no one paid attention when they rerouted storage around the back.

They weren't idiots. They didn't want to die here.

And they weren't trying to destroy anything. Just leave.

"FEDRA's not gonna come save us," Clara had said more than once. "This is a trap. Cal's building a cage and pretending it's safe, there probably isint a clicker there anyway and if there is we can kill it with all 5 of us."

Jules never disagreed.

Roy never argued either. But he watched the door more than he watched the others. Like he knew something was on the other side. And maybe he did, they got 2 others to go along with them.

Now, all five of them gathered around the welded door. Two men both ragged and scared in that quiet, dangerous way, held the makeshift battering ram: a metal beam reinforced with crate braces and duct tape.

The final bolts dropped with a click.

Jules whispered, "Ready."

Clara didn't hesitate.

"Push."

The ram slammed forward, loud and brutal. Once. Twice.

The door groaned.

Then—

Crash.

The beam snapped backward. The door didn't fall open.

It burst.

Clara stepped forward, already raising a light.

But what came out wasn't darkness, it was something that lived in it.

It was a blur, faster than humanly possible with strength enough to dent metal and durability to survive multiple point blank shots. It had a split, fungus-covered skull that obscured its eyes rendering it blind. Their heads and bodies are deformed, fully covered in mold and scaly fungal growths. The worst are their clicks and shrieks that can faintly sometimes even sound human. They use clicking and noises as echolocation to find, fight and kill their prey. 

As Clara looked Infront of her in horror she only had a split second of hearing the gurgling shriek that echoed through the chamber. The monster that made the demonic sound leapt — her vision was full as a pale fusion of skin and fungal growths, different from the usual yellow due to the lack of exposure to sun torn flesh, a face of fungus and teeth and pure hunger, covered in fungus like armour. Jumped at her, and.

It slammed into her.

Dragging her to the ground before she could scream.

Another one exploded out of the darkness behind it, hitting one of the men. Bone cracked. Blood hit the far wall.

Jules shouted something, maybe her name, maybe a warning, and reached for the prybar that fell out of his hands.

He didn't even swing before a third clicker tackled him sideways into a shelf, mauling at him with demonic savagery before biting into and through his collarbone, his wet blood gurgling scream came from the depths of his soul.

Roy in the meanwhile dropped his wooden club with nails. It clattered on the floor as he turned and ran.

Didn't even try to fight.

Didn't look back.

He bolted through the door and disappeared into the sewer tunnels without so much as a scream, he rather take his chances of avoiding FEDRA and other scavengers. He might live or he might get captured by FEDRA and executed on the spot without paperwork showing he is a resident of QZ

Behind him, the infected howled.

And the base the illusion of safety shattered in an instant like glass.

Back with Cal.

The scream hit like a blade.

Raw, echoing off the concrete, rising from somewhere deep and wrong. Not fear. Not pain. Just... final.

I didn't wait.

None of us did.

The thudding noise we'd heard earlier hadn't faded, it had moved. Violently.

I sprinted down the main corridor with Cole and Lia right behind me, feet pounding the ground, passing crates we hadn't finished cataloguing, passing rules, logic, everything. It didn't matter. Something had happened.

We skidded into the main junction—

And saw the door.

The welded one.

Open. 

Bent inward. Torn like paper from the inside. Rust scraped across the floor in wide arcs. The seal we swore would stay shut forever was gone.

And the blood was already everywhere.

Clara was lying just past the threshold, back arched, mouth slack, most of her face gone. One arm was still raised like it had tried to shield her. It hadn't worked.

The man beside her one of the two background summons that I barely interacted with, he was splattered across the wall, skull cracked open, ribs shattered. His body twitched once, then stilled, the abomination stood above him still screeching.

Jules was still alive. Barely.

But not for long.

He was screaming, not in panic, in absolute agony as a clicker tore into him, its clawed hands raking through his shoulder like paper, its face pressed against his as if it needed him to know what was happening. What was coming.

Cole didn't shout. Didn't hesitate.

He moved.

He drove his knife straight into the clicker's skull in one motion clean, practiced, like he'd done it a thousand times in another life. The thing screeched, bucked once, he brought his knife back and slammed it into his face again and again, it then dropped, twitching violently on top of Jules before going still.

But it wasn't over.

Another one bigger, louder came bursting from the still somewhat breathing corpse. It moved like something half-human, half-echo, its shrieks bouncing down the corridor. It lunged at Donny, who froze like a deer caught in headlights.

"Move!" I shouted too late.

Lia swung wide with a broken pipe, caught its side. The clicker staggered, pivoted, then hissed with a noise that wasn't natural, wasn't even close to human anymore.

Tasha appeared from the right side, out of breath, blood on her arm, eyes wild but not with rage, clutching the weapon she left in there.

Her eyes showed fear.

I'd never seen that on her before.

The third clicker joined the fray and it came straight for me.

I barely got my crowbar up before it slammed into me, knocking the wind out of my chest. We hit the ground. Its face hovered over mine split skull, clicking like a broken metronome, fungus peeling back in jagged ridges. Its teeth were inches away.

And then—

Tasha was on it.

She tackled the thing off me, knife flashing fast and brutal. She stabbed it in the chest, then the neck, then straight into the underside of its deformed jaw. Blood and rot hit her like a wave. She didn't stop.

Only when it collapsed fully did she turn not to the others.

To me.

"You okay?" she whispered, voice thin, hands shaking.

That was the part that hit hardest.

Tasha the one who gave gifts like warnings, the one who smiled when others flinched was shaking.

I nodded slowly, pulled myself up.

And saw the fifth summon the second unnamed crawling against the wall, a deep bite oozing black-red across his ribs.

He looked up at me. His voice cracked, pleading with me.

"Please, help me."

No one moved.

I stepped forward.

I raised the crowbar.

His eyes widened, a word or a scream about to tear from his throat.

One clean strike. That's all it took.

Mercy, and others knew it too.

Cole walked over to Clara's ruined body. Her face was barely recognizable one eye still open, blood soaked into her hair, her jaw dislocated.

He looked at me.

No words needed.

I nodded.

He handled it.

No glory. No honor. Just necessity.

And just like that, it was over.

Three clickers dead. Five summons down.

One missing, Roy. Gone into the sewer. Vanished.

The door hung open like a wound.

The warehouse… was broken.

And there was no going back.

Blood doesn't smell like fear. It smells like metal, salt, and heat.

The fear? That's something else. That's the silence after the screaming. The air that won't quite fill your lungs. The sound of your own heart hammering like it's trying to get out of your chest. That's what hung in the hallway after the last infected hit the ground.

I was still standing. Somehow. My arms were trembling. Not from pain not yet but from sheer adrenaline trying to crawl out through my fingertips.

Everyone else was still processing.

Tasha wiped her knife on Clara's jacket, her eyes wide, unfocused, locked on something that wasn't there. Her hands didn't stop moving, cleaning, adjusting, fixing but it was mechanical. Like her body was running without permission.

Across from her, Donny sat on the ground, knees pulled tight to his chest. He wasn't crying. He wasn't even blinking. He just kept staring at Clara's body like if he looked away, she'd get up again and hit him for zoning out.

Lia hovered near the supply crates, hands bloodied from the fight. She didn't speak. She just leaned against the wall, staring at her own shaking fingers.

Rusty had disappeared probably went to grab something to help clean the mess. Maybe something heavier, just in case there were more.

And Cole…

Cole was already working.

He dragged the corpses infected and human alike into a rough line. He checked each one for bites, signs of life, anything that might've mattered a minute ago.

Jules was gone. Half his face torn away. His mouth still open in what might've been a scream or just a final breath that never got out.

The other two the ones I maybe talked once or twice were too mangled to move cleanly.

"I'll burn the bodies," Cole said quietly, not looking at anyone.

No one argued.

Every one else like Marta, Elise, Kev and other summons. Just tried to keep themselves busy, do something. Anything to get their minds off it

I walked to the chalkboard.

Not because I had something to say. Because I needed to move. Needed something to hold onto like others. The sound of my boots scraping across the blood-speckled floor was the loudest thing in the world.

When I got there, I stared at the rules.

The top line had faded — Rule #1: Don't die.

Too late.

I picked up the chalk, snapped it once between my fingers, and wrote something new beneath it.

Rule #10: Disobedience kills.

That was it.

No jokes.

No sarcastic commentary.

Just the truth, sharp and final as a guillotine.

I turned around, expecting someone to say something.

No one did.

Eventually, Lia spoke first.

"Where's Roy?"

Her voice was hoarse.

Cole answered. "Gone. Sewer entrance. Dropped everything and ran."

I blinked. "What?"

Cole nodded once. "Checked. He's just… gone."

Not dead. Not marked as killed. Just missing.

Deserting.

That hit harder than the clickers.

Because it meant I'd lost sight too.

Rusty returned twenty minutes later with a cart and a bin full of scrap wood flammable liquid and trash to burn. He didn't say a word. Just set up a makeshift fire pit in the corner away from from other flammables and near enough a vent and began the slow, awful work of dragging the dead there.

One at a time.

He didn't ask for help.

I followed him anyway.

No one else came near.

We laid Clara in the pit. I wanted to say something anything. A joke. A line. Something to mark it. But the words stuck. Because she hadn't been a friend. Not really.

She'd been loud. Challenging. Annoying.

But she'd also been here.

And now she wasn't.

The fire crackled like it was trying not to draw attention to itself.

Tasha stayed near the wall the whole time, still gripping her knife. At one point I passed by and caught her looking at me not the usual unreadable expression. No smirk. No tilt of the head. Just raw, unfiltered worry.

When our eyes met, she looked away quickly. Her shoulders shook once, then steadied.

I filed that away for later, maybe she's treating me like family, a brother and was just worried for me.

Joe showed up late.

He didn't ask questions.

Didn't make a joke.

He just stood near the door, arms crossed, and stared at the burn pit.

"You see the glove?" he asked softly, after a long silence.

"What?"

"One of the ones that died. He left a glove behind. Didn't mean to. Just dropped it."

I frowned. "Okay…?"

Joe shrugged. "Just saying. Sometimes people leave things behind. Even when they don't mean to."

He didn't elaborate.

He never did.

The next few hours passed like molasses through barbed wire. Slow. Painful. Unnatural.

We scrubbed what we could. Stacked crates to block the breached door temporarily. It wouldn't hold against more clickers, but it made us feel like we were doing something. Anything.

Donny still hadn't spoken.

Lia sat with him for a while, trying to coax a word out. He didn't respond.

Eventually, she just stood up and went to busy herself to get her mind off.

I went back to the board again.

The rules looked worse now.

Like empty promises we'd etched into the wall to pretend we had order.

Next day, Cole walked up to me near the bunk zone.

"You need to start thinking ahead," he said.

"I'm trying."

"Try harder."

I stared at him, too tired to argue. Too wrung out to ask what he meant.

"Next time someone disobeys," he said, "they don't get a second chance."

"You saying we kill them before they kill us?"

"No. I'm saying we don't wait to see which it'll be."

He left after that.

And I didn't disagree.

Elise, Marta and Donny just kept busying themselves with things like cleaning things that were already semi-clean or moving crates.

Tasha finally slept. Curled near the edge of the room, eyes half-open until they weren't.

Rusty along with Kev didn't sleep at all. Just kept fixing things that didn't need fixing, Rusty his constant mad mumbling gone, only leaving silence that felt eery from him.

Joe scribbled something in a notebook. Probably another story he'd never finish.

Lia pulled me aside once, asked if I was okay.

I lied.

She didn't believe me.

But she let me lie.

I know she wasn't okay either, but I am too tired for words.

Before I left that night before I went back to the part of the QZ where things were still pretending to be normal I updated the fallback map/plan. Added two more things to it. Checked the hidden supply packs. Switched out one of the air filters.

Then I walked to the sealed crate at the far end of the hallway.

The one near the now-open door.

The red one.

I didn't touch it.

Just stared at the words stamped on the top:

"USMC — LOGISTICS STAGING AREA""SEALED FOR A REASON"

Funny, so was our welded door.

The blood, chaos and bad atmosphere has cleared up a bit with blood being mostly gone by the day after.

Not all of it. There are things you can't scrub out not with bleach, at least not with the amount and quality we have, not with hot water, not with time. Some had seeped into the cracks in the concrete. Some had soaked into the boots lined by the bunks. Some had just… stayed. In the air. In our throats.

But we cleaned anyway.

Because that's what you do after the screaming stops. You find the mop. You rinse the cloth. You pretend like order can be wrung out of chaos.

I stood in front of the chalkboard again. Same cracked tile under my feet. Same crumbling corner.

The rules were still there.

All nine.

And the new one, the one I'd added right after the fight sat cold and final:

Rule #10: Disobedience kills.

I didn't erase it.

I didn't need to.

But I made sure it was darker. Pressed the chalk in hard, traced over the letters slowly. Every line an echo of what we'd lost. Clara. Jules. Roy, the others

Hah, Roy.

Gone.

Vanished into the dark like he was never here. No body. No goodbyes. Just the sound of his weapon hitting the floor and his footsteps disappearing into the tunnel.

Cole stood behind me, silent. His arms crossed. His knife newly cleaned sat at his side like a reminder.

"Leave it," I said.

He nodded once.

"Anyone say anything?"

"Not yet."

"They will."

"Then we remind them."

That was all.

We didn't hold a funeral.

That would've required names. Stories. Something more than what we had.

But we did stop working.

Just for a moment.

The burn pit had gone cold hours ago, but the smell lingered wood, smoke and rot, like the past trying to claw its way into the present.

Lia gathered the group.

Rusty stopped moving for once.

Donny sat on a crate, still too quiet.

Tasha kept her back to the room, sharpening her blade slowly, but she didn't leave.

Others gathered around, both old and new summons. The ones who I spent a lot of time and those I barely know the names of.

I stood in front of the chalkboard and said nothing.

Didn't need to.

They all looked at me.

No speeches. No dramatic declarations. Just that one rule, hanging over all of us. Now underlined and in bold.

Disobedience kills.

Afterward, Rusty and I replaced the crate barricade by the broken door with something heavier, a partial shelf welded to the frame. It wouldn't stop anything serious, but it sent a message: no one goes in or out without going through us. 

Its not good enough, it could still somewhat be open or slided to the side but its something.

Rusty worked without his usual commentary.

That was maybe the scariest part.

Tasha approached me before I left.

She didn't say anything at first.

Just stood there, swaying slightly, like she couldn't decide if she was about to ask a question or bury a knife in someone.

Then, without meeting my eyes, she said, "I didn't save you because I thought I had to."

I blinked. "Okay."

"I just wanted to."

A pause.

"That's all."

Then she walked off.

I am so fucking lost right now what?

Some time later, when I had a some free time, I hid for a bit.

I sat alone in locker room near the sewer entrance, room that really doesn't have anything in there anymore, so I made it into my impromptu thinking area with a blanket laid on a old spinning chair making it a bit more comfortable, now I dont feel every spring just some springs.

I opened my system menu, and opened a list of active personnel in the warehouse.

I scrolled through the list, a relatively new function, a function I'd checked dozens of times.It was sorted alphabetically now. I'd organized it two updates ago.

Clara — deceasedJules — deceasedMax — deceasedNathan — deceasedTheir entries were already greyed out, tagged with a red marker. A little lock icon beside each one, their stats frozen, relationship bars inactive, loyalty indicators gone dark.

The system remembered them. Tracked them. Gave me the mercy of knowing.

Then I scrolled lower.

To Roy.

Only... he wasn't there.

Not greyed out. Not marked as dead.

Just—Gone.

His name, his ID, his logs all erased. Like the system hadn't just lost him.

It had never had him.

A cold knot pulled tight in my gut.

There wasn't even an error message. Just clean silence. Like I'd imagined him.

Like Roy had never existed at all.

I sat there for a long time, hunched over, staring at the floating screen.

Not breathing. Not blinking.

The system didn't do this.Not to me.Not without telling me.

But it had. Or maybe it hadn't. That was the problem — I couldn't know.

I'd thought I was in control.

I'd thought as long as I followed the rules, made the right choices, calculated every risk, that I could keep the chaos at bay.

Roy had proved me wrong.

He hadn't died.

He'd escaped.

From the warehouse. From me. From the system.

And if one of them could do it, even by accident…

How many more?

How long before the others start questioning things deeper than just leadership?

I killed the interface with a sharp mental flick. The glow vanished. The dark rushed back in.

I stayed seated in the closet for another five minutes, trying to tell myself that losing one piece on the board didn't mean the game was broken.

We waited three days before going in.

Not because we were scared we were absolutely terrified with Donny practically about to pass out. But because we had to get things under control first. Re-seal the barricades. Burn the dead. Make sure no one else had ideas about sneaking off to find their own clicker surprise party.

And honestly? I needed those three days to stop shaking.

On the fourth day, we geared up.

Cole, Lia, Tasha, Rusty, and me. No one else. Everyone else was either too shell-shocked, too weak, or just too sane to volunteer for the tour of the newly opened hell annex.

I stood at the barricade now reinforced with a solid shelving unit, extra bolts, and a very polite spray-painted warning that read:

"DO NOT OPEN. AGAIN."

Rusty peeled it back slowly.

The door behind it wasn't bent anymore. Cole had re-hinged it. It didn't squeal or groan.

It just opened. It took some effort as it was quite literally jammed in.

The hallway beyond was darker than the rest of the warehouse. The lights had long since blown out or died of neglect. I clicked on my flashlight and swept it across the walls.

Concrete. Scuffed. Stained.

But not moldy. Not water-damaged. Not ruined. No signs of spores thankfully

Just… sealed.

It felt like we'd stepped into a memory someone had tried to forget.

We moved slowly.

Every footstep echoed. The air was dry but thin, like it had been held in a box too long.

Cole took point, crowbar in hand.

Tasha flanked him, knife out, her expression a blank sheet of paper that might've once been fear, or maybe something worse.

Rusty kept muttering under his breath, cataloguing things aloud like it helped keep him grounded. "Old wiring. Fluorescent panel type B. No power hum. Might've been cut before the outbreak."

"Means someone shut this place down on purpose," I said.

He didn't answer.

Lia held the rear, double-checking corners and checking chalk marks as we moved. Her movements were efficient. Focused. But I could tell she was rattled. Everyone was.

Including me.

The first room we entered had once been some kind of office or operations bay.

Old desks, rusted filing cabinets, a whiteboard that had faded to yellow. The words EVACUATION DELAYED – STAY PUT UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS were still faintly visible, scrawled in red marker.

Half the chairs were overturned. One had a hole in the seat cushion shaped suspiciously like a knife had been stabbed through it repeatedly.

But no bodies.

No blood.

No signs of battle.

Just abandonment.

Cole opened a supply locker with a grunt. Inside were three full MRE packs and a medical bag labeled USMC — Field 92.

"Marine Corps," he said, glancing back at me.

I nodded.

We pressed forward.

The next hallway had collapsed ceiling panels on one side. Rubble formed a kind of natural path between jagged rebar and dust-choked vents. Rusty muttered something about structural compromise, but no one stopped moving.

That's when we found the crates.

Red. Large. Stacked in the far end of what looked like a loading bay.

Each one was sealed. Some welded. Others chained shut. The symbols were military but not FEDRA. Older. Cleaner. More bureaucratic.

Lia wiped the dust off the closest one and read aloud.

"PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY - BIO/CONTINGENCY CACHE 3""NOT TO BE OPENED WITHOUT COMMAND CLEARANCE"

I swallowed hard.

"This wasn't a warehouse," I said slowly. "It was a holding zone."

"For what?" Rusty asked, voice quieter now.

Tasha stepped beside me, tracing one of the crates with a fingertip.

"It's not just supplies," she said. "This feels like… punishment."

Cole crouched beside one, tapped it lightly with the crowbar. "These aren't standard issue. Steel's thicker. Could take a shotgun blast and not budge."

I swept my light across the other crates, different stamps, all military-affiliated.

USMC – MEDICAL STAGING

DEPT. OF DEFENSE – CIVILIAN RELOCATION SUPPLIES

ARMY CORPS – BIO RESPONSE: CLASSIFIED

"Why store this all together?" Lia asked.

"To forget it, or to stash it for someone." I said, staring at one crate in particular.

It had no markings.

Just red paint. Fresh compared to the others.

And a faint handprint, smudged, but still visible.

"Clear so far," Cole muttered, standing upright again. "Whatever was here… it's not here anymore."

"Or it's deeper in," I said.

Everyone went quiet.

We hadn't cleared the full hall yet. There were more doors, more paths. The area beyond the red crates narrowed into another corridor — half-lit, half-buried by debris.

But it was still passable.

Barely.

I turned back to the group.

"We push deeper," I said.

No one argued.

The corridor narrowed after the crates.

The walls turned from concrete to panelled steel to old industrial plating, cold to the touch. My flashlight beam jittered across surface dust that hadn't been disturbed in years. The air here wasn't stale. It was dead. Not a single speck of mold. Not a flicker of movement. Just stillness layered like a shroud.

Cole took point again. His boots crunched lightly over shattered glass. "This place was sealed before the outbreak got bad," he said. "Military protocol. Containment site. Maybe fallback shelter."

"Then why abandon it?" Lia asked.

Rusty's voice was rough behind her. "Because whatever they sealed in wasn't worth opening again."

I believed him.

We passed a break room. Long tables, overturned chairs, a vending machine tilted sideways with a half-melted candy bar still wedged in the coil. A faded USMC recruitment poster drooped from the far wall, corners curled and blackened by moisture.

Someone had written across it in thick red marker:

"THEY NEVER CAME BACK."

None of us commented.

We kept moving.

Tasha had gone silent again not creepy-silent this time. Focused. Knife in one hand, the other hovering near the base of her spine like she was trying to feel something crawling just beneath her skin.

Cole motioned to a junction up ahead. "Split corridor. We clear right. Left looks blocked."

We turned right carefully, weapons up.

The hallway ended at a security station. Or what was left of it. A glass observation window had shattered inward. The console inside was coated in dust. Bullet holes pocked the far wall. A single camera still hung from the ceiling, long dead, staring blankly at nothing.

I stepped inside and scanned the old monitors. Most were static. One still displayed a frozen frame grainy and gray, at least whatever is powering it must be powerful and still useful:

Five soldiers in full gear. One civilian. All standing behind the welded door. One soldier aiming a rifle. The civilian's mouth open, mid-yell.

A frame from before.

Right before.

I stared at it too long. My reflection blurred over the screen.

"Cal," Lia called softly. "You'll want to see this."

They were standing at the end of the hall. In front of the final door.

someone had spray-painted the wall beside a busted down door, in large, uneven strokes. Not recent. At least a decade old. The paint was flaking, but the words were still legible.

WE LOCKED THEM IN.THERE WAS NO OTHER CHOICE.

Beneath that, a smaller scribble, almost too faded to read:

ONE OF THEM WAS BITTEN. THEY ARE PROBABLY INFECTED TOO.

Tasha read it out loud. Her voice barely made a sound.

Lia stepped back. "Jesus."

Cole didn't flinch. "Civilians panicked. Locked the squad inside. Thought it was containment."

"Turns out it was a grave," Rusty added. His voice was flat.

I ran my hand across the wall, feeling the paint dust crumble under my fingers.

The pieces came together.

Five people.

One infected.

Four weren't.

But the others couldn't be sure. Couldn't risk it. So they locked them all in, hoping help would come. Hoping that maybe the infected one would die quietly and not take the rest with them.

The civilians probably fearing the infected or retaliation if they were wrong about the infection welded the door to this entire wing. And now, a decade later, someone had opened that same door because they were tired of rules. Because they thought they could handle it. Because they were looking for freedom.

That's when I saw the crate.

One of the older ones partially crushed, shoved under a stack of scrap. The lid had splintered open. Most of it was junk. Manuals. Old documents. Half-melted tape reels.

But in the corner, tucked between two rusted field kits, was a paper-wrapped bundle.

I pulled it out carefully.

Unfolded it.

It was a torn sheet of military issue paper, the kind with stamped margins and standard fields. Most of it was smudged. Water-damaged. Ink bled from the edges like it had been soaked and re-dried a dozen times.

But the handwriting was still there. Cramped. Scrawled in frustration and fading hope.

Sgt. Diaz, 3rd Fireteam — Reporting final status.

Trapped in auxiliary staging area. Door sealed from outside. Civilians panicked. Bitten evacuee identified too late.

No confirmation of command signal. No evac bird. No medical kit strong enough to reverse symptoms.

Briggs showing signs now. Johnson still clear. Baker… unsure.

Maybe I am infected, who knows. They welded us inside

I would've done the same.

If only we knew how it spreads, but we didn't know how it did.

No one told us it could spread before you turned.

No one told us about the spores we found in that old shop we went in, no one told us the infection might not wait.

The last line had been underlined. Twice.

"We didn't know how it worked."

I stared at that for a long time.

Long enough for the ink to feel like it was soaking into my hands.

It wasn't just a note.

It was a confession.

A warning from the past.

They either all of them got infected by spores or someone turned in middle of night and infected others and they killed the infected and the attacked. Which would explain why there were only 3 of them, I don't know.

They didn't know. None of them knew what they were dealing with. That's why the soldiers died. Why Clara died. Why Jules died.

Why we almost joined them.

I folded the note carefully and tucked it into my notebook.

Not to log it. Not to report it.

To remember it.

Because that one sentence mattered more than all the missions, all the rules, all the upgrades:

We didn't know how it worked.

And if I ever forgot that — if I ever thought I understood this whole thing too well — people would die.

Again.

I turned to the others.

"No one goes past this point. Not until we've reinforced the outer hall."

They nodded.

No pushback.

This wasn't about curiosity anymore.

It was about containment.

We turned back.

The lights flickered behind us as we walked. One of them blinked twice, then popped, showering sparks across the floor like dying fireflies.

The door didn't close on its own, but when Cole hauled it shut behind us, the echo went on too long.

Like it didn't want to stay sealed.

We made it back to the main base in silence.

No one said a word as we crossed the threshold of the barricade and sealed the door behind us. Rusty re-bolted it, Cole stacked another crate in front without even being asked. Lia walked straight to the sink, washed her hands three times, then just stood there staring at her fingers like they didn't belong to her.

Tasha sat near the bunks, knife in her lap, not sharpening it this time. Just holding it.

The others, the ones who hadn't gone with us watched with wide, silent eyes.

Something had changed in us.

Something they felt.

I didn't go home.

Not yet.

I slipped away to the far storage room not the new one, not the red-crated hellhole. The older one. Safe. Familiar. Where we kept the sorting table and the older gear I hadn't found a use for yet.

I just needed to breathe.