The Last Of Us | tk ✓

thirty-seven | close call

They smelt it before they saw it.

Early winter noon hours threw light winds on their precipitating faces, cooling off their sweat to leave behind a likeness for the autumn weather.

The alleys they wounded through were leading them out the city, past the littered and crumpled suburbs, a void mourning for the life that once sustained it. They pressed against the boundaries, weapons clutched numbingly against whiten knuckles.

Under the genial, clear blue sky with the warm sun winking, the pair, one clad in black leather top to bottom and the company with a bright yellow sweater beneath a jade parka and jeans ripped from a few places, trudged between two premises on the calloused pavement with pebbles crunching underneath their well-worn boots.

"Shit," breathed out Jeongguk. They've walked right into a dead end. Humongous boulders and thick rods jutted out in every direction piled up high in front of them; a fallen structure that now barricades their way out.

Speculating, Taehyung opines reluctantly, "We should retrace our footsteps, maybe find another way through that'll get us north-east." Jeongguk passed him a small smile.

"We'll get lost," said Jeongguk gradually, as if the cogs in his brain were only just gaining velocity, he beseeched, "We need to get through, some... how..."

The property on their right was an ongoing futile, sixty-feet white-washed wall that stood erect against all odds. On their, however, was a margin of a cathedral, a window propped up at arms reach, a peak within with sunlight trickling into the dusty, oakwood indoors.

Jeongguk sucked on his inner cheek before ordering, "Run to me, I'll give you a boost." Taehyung did not forage for a reasonable jibe to liquidate the sheer flaunting Jeongguk deliberately put forth, for he knew why it was not the other way around.

Taehyung was shorter than him.

He tucked his wrench in his back pocket, pushed the gun back in the holster. Once he sped up to Jeongguk, he resonated his jump with the push Jeongguk gave by his inclined fingers, grunts from both, then Taehyung squeezed into the gap and fell right on a carpet with a cloud of dust raised around him in his disturbing presence.

He coughed. Then he gave his trademark mighty thunderous sneeze which always made Jeongguk jump.

On the other side, Jeongguk tremulously struggled to heave himself up to join Taehyung.

The latter perused his surroundings. The altar in the far corner was obliterated. Of what remained of the benches were broken pieces of furniture tossed messily around the thick and tattered carpet.

Three wooden crates about Taehyung's height sat out of place hither and thither with packaging agency stamps upon them. The exits were sealed off except the hallway leading to God-knows-what.

"Urgh." The smell hit him, his utter willpower managing to bear down the fried, decaying moose they had found in the streets. It was like wading across a swamp of dead bodies several days old.

Eyes filling the brim with tears of constraint, for the very first time he picked a growl that is coarsed out from behind one of the stacked boxes.

A tapered inhale, Taehyung submitted their doom. "Fuck," he says, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck!" He turned around to warn Jeongguk, perhaps howling at him to run. All he did was stand there rooted on the spot, goose pimples forming all over his body rapidly.

His vocal cords were, for reason unbeknownst, entangled and became dysfunctional.

The large figure rose.