borderline - the last of us.

13. beauty sleep.

'WHERE THE FUCK IS THE HIGHWAY?' Joel grumbled to nobody in particular, speeding through the alleyways of the city to try and get out of it as fast as possible. Ralph began to consult his map which a scrunched-up face, mumbling quietly to himself. 'Al!'

'I don't know, give me a minute!' He ordered, mapping out the turn they took, then the first alley they drove down, then the second, and then the third. 'I'm, like, twenty percent sure that we're going North.'

'Twenty percent?' Joel repeated, hoping that statistic would've been far higher than it actually was.

'Hey, it was going good until you did the Hokey-Pokey and you turned the car around!' He threw his hands up in surrender before leaning forward to observe his map closer. 'I think it's on the right—?'

'Stop!' Ellie demanded, and Joel slammed on the brakes, almost causing Ralph to thwack his head off the dashboard. He turned around, looking back at Ellie and his daughter to see what the fuss was.

'Where the fuck's FEDRA?' Lou and Ellie were bunched up around the window closest to the left of the car so they could see the sight of the Kansas QZ, completely empty and with the doors lying wide open. A complete ghost town. Then, Ralph's fist came in contact with Joel's arm, and it wasn't as gentle as it was meant to be, but it got Joel to turn his attention to the man limping towards the car and begging for help.

He said something that Ralph couldn't quite hear, but Joel seemed to be right on top of it. 'Put your seatbelts on.'

'Aren't we gonna help him?' Ellie asked, shuffling to the middle seat and grabbing her seatbelt. Ralph made sure that he heard two clicks before he plugged in his own, looking at Joel for an answer to the question.

'No.'

Joel stepped on the gas, aiming right at the man and giving him less than a minute to jump out of the way and get to safety. Then, like quickfire, someone on top of a building dropped a cinderblock right onto the windshield and smashed the shit out of it. Joel leaped back, fucking horrified and rightly so, until the sounds of a gun being fired rang out and Ralph leaned over to take control of the wheel, pulling it to the right and crashing them right into a laundromat.

'Holy fuck.' He gasped, shoving his hands over his face in a moment of silence. He dropped them quickly when he realized that those assholes were probably still trying to kill them, and reached for his seatbelt. 'You guys okay?'

'Yeah, I'm good!' Ellie called back, opening her car door and climbing out of it as soon as bullets started bouncing off the truck. Lou said something he couldn't hear, something about being alright, and that was all he needed to know before he was following Ellie and getting out of the truck.

The four of them crouched down behind a pickup truck with an array of heavy backpacks and two guys shooting at them wasn't an ideal situation, but, with a little bit of optimism, it was one that they could probably manage.

Cautiously, Joel raised himself to his knees and reached his arm into the trunk of the car, where he had been stashing his shotgun. Another bullet fired, and it sounded dangerously close, but he returned with all of his limbs still intact, so that was good. He had managed to fish out Ralph's rifle as well, letting it clatter to the ground in front of him while he found more importance in sliding open the mag tube of his shotgun.

Whilst Joel was on his miniature stealth mission, Ralph was scoping out the area and looking for any possible exits, any other weapons, just anything. He didn't find anything of use, except for a door behind a counter and a hole in the wall not too far away from them, leading to another room. He looked back at Ellie and Lou, pointing to it. 'Can you guys fit in there?'