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Ellie looks around and she doesn’t know where she is. Darkness is all she can see and yet somehow a light shines above her, making her the only light in the darkness. It feels like there is a thick fog around her as she walks. The floor, if it even is a floor as she can’t tell, has a small pool of water on it and it splashes gently as she walks. Then she hears the screaming. Joel’s screaming.
”Joel?!”
She screams whips around attempting to find where the sound is coming from but it echoes. It sounds like the screaming-his screaming is coming from all around her. She takes off running straight ahead, just attempting to navigate through the fog and darkness to where she hopes the sound is coming from.
Joel’s screams continue to echo as she runs through the fog and she has to slap her hands over her ears as she runs. The sound too painful to keep listening to and yet it sounds just as loud no matter how hard she tries to block it out. In fact it sounds like his screams are getting louder and louder as she tries to cover her ears and keeps running forward.
”JOEL!? JOEL, WHERE ARE YOU!?”
She screams as she keeps running, unsure of what to do at this point while she tries to keep blocking out his pained screams. She stops when the yells of pain turn into something else. The sound of her name being screamed in a very familiar Texas accented voice.
“ELLIE!”
She shoots into action as she hears Joel screaming her name. For whatever reason the sound of him screaming her name is much more clear than his yells of pain. She runs faster than she ever has in her life and the water below her splashes loudly as she run. The fog seems to be clearly up as she runs towards Joel’s screams of her name. She’s almost there, she’s almost reached him. She can just feel it.
”Joel! Joel, I’m coming!”
She calls as the fog starts to thinner and thinner until it parts and she is just surrounded by the darkness. She doesn’t see Joel however and she spins in a full 360 to try and find him. Nothing. The sound of lights flicker on catches her attention and a row of lights has flickered on in the darkness. Like it’s trying to lead her and she subconsciously starts following them to wherever they are taking her.
When she reaches the end there is a piece of stone sticking out and she walks over and feels her heart drop. It’s a gravestone and she drops in front of it as she feels her eyes water with tears. She reaches out and traces the engraved words on the gravestone.
Joel Miller
September 26, 1981 - January 25th 2038
Beloved Father, Brother, and Friend
No no no no no. Ellie doesn’t want to believes it, Joel’s fine! She just heard him screaming for her not too long ago, didn’t she? She…she thought she did, no, she KNOWS she heard him screaming for her just a few seconds ago. And yet somehow she was too late, she was too late to save him.
She goes to pull away when a hand shoots out from the dirt beneath the grave and grabs her wrist. Ellie screams and tries to pull away but can’t get the hand off her. It’s green and rotted, she can see the bone and dried blood on it. It smells sickeningly sweet and even worse than a Clicker somehow. She forces herself to stop struggling when she sees the watch band hanging loosely on the rotting wrist. The familiar green band and cracked glass of the watch on the wrist of this rotting corpse. It’s Joel’s watch.
Another hand and arm shoots out of the ground and the first hand lets go of Ellie as it attempts to pull itself out of the ground. Ellie backs up as she watches this corpse pull itself out of the ground and she gasps when she realizes it’s Joel. His clothes are torn up and even though he probably doesn’t need to anymore, pants for air. His graying brown hair is matted, tangled and covered in cobwebs, the decay on him is obvious from the smell, how emaciated he looks, and the bones and what little muscle is felt sticking out.
His head shoots up at an unnatural angle which makes the bones in his neck snap and crack. Ellie tries to crawl away as she gets a look at his face. The right half of his face is green and rotted, his cheek is sunken in and his facial hair goes with it…the upper left side of his face is gone. Only the skull is visible and she gasps as Joel moves and stumbles since his muscles are all but rotted away.
He lunges at her and he looks unhappy and even angry to see her here. His rotten yellow teeth snarl at her and his breath smells more like death than the rest of him did.
”IT’S YOUR FAULT!”
He snarls at her. His voice rough and gravely from the rotting in his throat but still so distinctly him. Saliva drips down his face and she doesn’t know how saliva is coming from a corpse but that isn’t her main concern. She feels like she’s about to have a heart attack from how much her chest is hurting and how hard it is to breathe. She knows exactly what this corpse of Joel is talking about, his death, how she wasn’t able to stop it from happening. How Abby only came after him and killed him because he killed Abby’s dad to save her.
”N-No. Joel, I tried. I promise I tried.”
She says and feels tears run down her face as she tries to get Joel’s animated corpse off her but he isn’t budging. He stays on top of her and glares at her like she is the scum of the earth. She doesn’t want to believe that it was her fault. Joel wouldn’t let her believe that his death was her fault. But his corpse is right here and on top of her and screaming at her that his death was her fault.
“IT’S YOUR FAULT! YOU KILLED ME!”
He yells at her and Ellie can hear the sound of a crow cawing from above as dozens upon dozens above them as they fly by. Ellie screams as spiders start crawling out of Joel’s exposed eye socket and fall on her, crawling all over her and try to crawl insider her ears, nose, mouth, through her eyes.
”IT’S YOUR FAULT I’M DEAD!”
Joel screams one more time and Ellie goes to scream herself but before she can she…
Shoots straight up in her bed and looks around the dark room she’s in. Nightmare. It was nothing but a nightmare. Joel’s gone and he isn’t coming back as some rotting corpse looking for revenge…he’s…he’s gone and not coming back. Abby killed him with that golf club and he’s buried in the Jackson cemetery.
And even though she knows if Joel was still here he’d tell her it wasn’t her fault he was gone. That his death wasn’t her fault and that he made the choices he did. That he made his bed and now he had to lie in it and accept what happened.
But he isn’t here. It’s just Ellie, alone in her bed panting from the nightmare she just had. And as she sits there she can’t help but think about what Joel’s corpse told her in her nightmare….and she holds her face in her hands and cries. Cries over Joel, cries over the fact that she let Abby go, cries over the fact that she won’t ever get the chance to fix things with Joel…and most of all…
She cries over the fact that maybe it really is her fault he’s dead.