Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Elizabeth looks at him like she can’t believe.

She stares at the weapons, back at him.

Then she nods, only not for agreement, but more for realising the worst in somebody.

She goes to fold the tarpaulin roll, then seems too disgusted to let her hands even touch it.

‘You and your stupid weapons.’ Then: ‘What if there was a search party? What if that was our only chance and we missed it? What if we missed our last ever chance of being saved? Did you think about that?’

‘What if they were bad bastards. Did you think about that?’

She hitches her bag up, then starts on the path, going quick like we’re in an even bigger hurry.

‘You don’t know what you’re walking into,’ shouts Calum Ian after her. ‘I was just trying to defend us. To keep the team safe. You’re the one that’s always going on about teamwork. That’s what it was.’

‘Protect us: from who? It’s you who wants to poison people. Maybe it’s you we’ve to worry about.’

Now he’s made Elizabeth nervous. I see her move from the middle of the road to the side – trailing the fence, then kneeling, like his words had some effect after all.

It gets us all nervous – so when we see the wind turbine moving – just before the houses of Bagh a Tuath – there might as well be a hundred folk on it, waving.

Calum Ian orders us to wait in the grass, where we hide and watch for a bit: listening for strangeness in the sound it makes as it chops air.

Alex thinks it’s a sign that adults are still alive. Elizabeth doesn’t agree. She says it turns all by itself until the day it gets rusted and stops.

Our third house has a ramp going around and up to its front door. There are two gates, both with stiff bolts. We take it in turns to climb over. There’s a door-knocker with a nameplate which says: E. R. KERR.

As soon as we open the door there’s a smell. Not the worst smell, but a definite one.

The hallway’s narrow, middle-bright. There’s a tipped-over walking frame on the floor. It’s got an empty string bag tied to the front of it, plus a long stick with pincers for picking stuff up. Old person things.

Because of the smell Alex won’t come in.

He waits on the step outside, and begins to count aloud to tell us how long we’ve taken—

‘Stopping at two hundred. One, two, three—’

We tie on our perfume-hankies, which is the best thing to have done, because when we go into the kitchen we discover that there’s an old woman dead in a chair.

She’s not alive. It’s easy to see. She’s fallen to her side, all twisted up like the trees by the north shore.

Her skin went black.

We search the rest of the kitchen, trying not to look at her. In the end Calum Ian puts a towel over her head.

I worry that it’s disrespectful, but truthfully, it’s better not to see.

We open the kitchen drawers. The fridge stinks, plus it’s empty. We look in the bathroom cabinets, the bedroom, then every cupboard in the kitchen again.

At the end of this Elizabeth just sits on the hall floor.

‘Nothing.’

Calum Ian bangs his hand on the doorframe.

‘Who tells Alex?’

It’s just then, when we’re trying to pluck up the courage to go out and tell him, that Alex begins to shout.

Something scared him proper: because now he comes into the house to get us.

He’s shaking, won’t stop.

Calum Ian gets to him first. He puts Alex’s hands at his sides for attention then asks him what he’s playing at.

‘Was no—not—’

I remember now how his words got broken up, after it happened. So does Elizabeth: she kneels down and speaks to Alex quietly, trying to unmess his thoughts.

‘Remember, one at a time. Slowly.’

‘N—n—’

‘ Think of all your words. Separately, like you did before. Go on. A big breath, it’s easy.’

‘Th—there. Was.’

‘OK… there was what?’

‘A thing.’

Calum Ian straightens up right away: and looks at all of us, making a told-you-so noise. He asks: ‘What kind ? A man, right? He must’ve been hiding, I bloody knew it! Did he look bad? Was he like the bad man in the DVD?’

Alex presses his hands to his cheeks.

‘I can’t believe it was real! It wasn’t a dream!’

Elizabeth gets his attention by clicking her fingers in front of his face. She speaks sharper now.

‘Describe for us.’

‘Ran away… it had eyes and a face.’

‘So it was a dog, or a cat.’

‘No. It was running up on its two legs like a person.’

‘ Alex. You can’t be making stuff up.’

‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

Now when Calum Ian takes his roll of knives out of his rucksack we don’t say a thing.

He chooses the all-silver one: checking the sharpness of it by jabbing it into the wood of the floor.

For now we let him be in charge. He tries to look angry, like a man could be, but still, I can see he’s scared.

I wait for Elizabeth to tell him to put down the knife; this time she doesn’t. Nor does she tell him to stop when he hands out darts and knives to the rest of us.

I don’t know how to hold a knife for proper defence. Neither does Duncan, who drops his.

‘You grab – always – with two hands,’ Calum Ian whispers fiercely. ‘So go for the guts. Or the throat, and you attack first. Always first. We come in from three or four sides, that puts up our strength, right?’

He forces us down in the grass.

‘ Listen. ’

For ages there’s only birdsong, and the whurry-whurry of the wind turbine.

Then there’s barking – we see three dogs.

They see us as well, and they come close, tails wagging and their ears backwards for friendship.

One tries to get close to Duncan who holds up the shaking end of his knife.

‘And we were afraid!’ laughs Calum Ian, with a rise in his voice for relief, that it was maybe only dogs, after all.

But these dogs are strange.

It gets in me that they’ve been painted. They have blue stripes along their sides.

One of them has a blue face. Blue-tipped whiskers.

‘So they tried to drink paint,’ Calum Ian says, though he doesn’t sound convinced by himself.

It’s when I look at Elizabeth to see what she thinks about the dogs that I notice she’s looking in a different direction: with her eyes fixed, just staring.

When I follow where her eyes are going, I see.

A little girl.

We stand to show ourselves and the girl runs away.

Seeing an animal that isn’t a dog or cat looks so strange that nobody can even react.

But then Elizabeth does – ‘Wait!’ she shouts, but the girl nips between two hedges and is gone.

We close in around on both sides – and she jumps out again, running fast.

It’s hard to follow her, she’s so quick: running around the back of the circle of houses, crawling behind and between bins, rubbish-piles, gas canisters.

‘She went in at the end!’

The end-house has a load of rubbish in its front garden. Black bags, tarpaulin, held with fishing rope, lines all twisted in an untidy heap. The garden smells. I see lots of shit on the grass, which I hope is from dogs.

Alex and Duncan are posted to the back door. Me and Elizabeth and Calum Ian stay around the front.

By the doorstep there’s a shivery cat, with five rag-doll kittens taking milk. It’s lying on a pair of jeans inside an old tyre. The cat meows, hisses at us.

We ring the doorbell. It’s not working.

There’s a strong smell when we open the door. The smell is of many things: rotten food, damp, shit, pee, dogs. It’s hard to tell if there’s a dead person’s smell there too. Calum Ian says there is. Elizabeth says there isn’t.