Room Checks

A Short Story in the World of The Last of Us Part I

The whiteboard was nobody's idea and everybody's idea, which was how things worked in Alarcon Hall those first few days, before they stopped working at all.

Someone found it in the second-floor RA office. Someone else dragged it down to the lobby. A third person, maybe Tyler, maybe not, nobody could agree later, wrote the first entry in green dry-erase marker, all caps, like a kid writing on a classroom board because the teacher left the room:

ALARCON HALL, WHO'S STILL HERE

SEPT 28, 2013 Ten names. Ten room numbers. That was it. That was everyone.

  The outbreak struck UEC around homecoming week. The Bighorn pride banners were still swaying from the lampposts outside, green and gold, GO BIG HORNS printed in block letters beneath a cartoon ram that grinned with a confidence that now felt obscene. The campus was frozen in time, homecoming posters from barely a week ago still tacked to bulletin boards, the ink still sharp, the tape still holding.

  Out of a building designed for sixty, ten students had managed to be inside when the Cordyceps brain infection turned everything they understood about the world into a footnote. Most of them hadn't even known each other before. Connor had been in his room watching the emergency broadcast when FEDRA's campus alert hit his phone, the one that just said SHELTER IN PLACE, DO NOT EXIT BUILDINGS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, and by the time he got downstairs, someone had already shoved a vending machine against the front door, and a girl he'd never spoken to was screaming at a guy he'd never seen to help her flip the other one.

  That was Priya. That was Devon. And that was the beginning of everything, though nobody called it a beginning. Nobody called it anything. They were just ten strangers in a dorm on the campus of the University of Eastern Colorado, listening to Boulder tear itself apart outside the covered windows, trying not to think about the fact that their parents weren't answering their phones, trying not to think about the things they'd seen on the news before the signal cut out: people convulsing, people biting, people moving in ways that human bodies were not supposed to move.

  The ten:

 Connor, Room 200. Junior. Biology major. Kept a list of things in the margins of a torn-up textbook because writing made him feel like a person.

Devon, Room 104. Sophomore. Loud. Owned a baseball bat he'd brought from home, leaned it against his shoulder like he'd been waiting his whole life for an excuse to carry it.

Priya, Room 315. Senior. Pre-law. Argued about everything, which turned out to be both essential and unbearable.

Tyler, Room 202. Freshman. Nervous. Talked too much when he was scared, which was always.

Jada, Room 112. Junior. Quiet in a way that felt intentional, like she was conserving something.

Ashley, Room 308. Sophomore. Friendly, almost aggressively so, the type who made eye contact and asked how you were doing and actually waited for an answer.

Terrence, Room 305. Junior. Big. Kept to himself. People left him alone and he seemed to prefer it that way.

Nate, Room 118. Freshman. Scrawny. Tried to make jokes that nobody laughed at, then laughed at them himself, which was somehow worse.

Sophie, Room 311. Sophomore. Had a camping stove and a bag of supplies she'd packed for a music festival up in Fort Collins that never happened.

Mark, Room 209. Senior. The one who left.

  No one was in charge. That was the first problem, or maybe the last problem, or maybe it was the only problem and everything else was just a symptom. They talked about it once, that first night, sitting in the lobby in a loose circle that kept shifting because nobody wanted to be in the center. Through the boarded windows, they could hear sounds from across campus, near the science building with its mirrored facade, the one the upperclassmen called "the giant mirror." Something was happening over there. Glass breaking. Alarms. Sounds that were not quite human.

  "Someone should be in charge," Tyler said.

  "Why?" Devon said.

  "Because that's how it works. Someone leads."

  "Leads what? We're just sitting here."

  "We need rules, though. Like FEDRA rules. Structure."

  "FEDRA's not coming for us. You hear any helicopters? You see any soldiers? They locked down the quarantine zones and left the rest of us out here to rot."

  "Fine. Rule one: don't die. Rule two: don't be stupid. There. I'm done leading."

  Priya suggested a system: daily check-ins, everyone comes to the lobby at noon, shows their face, confirms they're okay. If you're sick, you say so. If someone doesn't show, two people go knock. Simple. Democratic. Nobody's the boss, but everybody's accountable.

  It sounded good. Most things sound good when you're sitting in a circle and the world hasn't completely fallen apart yet.

  They split into groups almost immediately, not by decision but by gravity. Devon and Nate and Tyler claimed the first floor, which had the closest access to the exits, which Devon said was strategic and Priya said was paranoid. Priya and Jada and Sophie took the third floor, where Sophie's camping stove became the unofficial kitchen. Connor drifted between floors, not belonging to either group, which suited him. Ashley and Terrence stayed in their rooms mostly, orbiting the edges.

  As many students and faculty either died or became infected, some managed to hold out in various parts of the campus, building barricades to keep the infected out. That was the story of the whole university, as far as Connor could tell from what they'd heard through the walls and the windows: pockets of survivors in different buildings, each one sealed off, each one alone. Someone had left a journal in the stairwell describing the situation in Ding Hall, where a couple of students had kept a radio working to get news from the outside world, scrounging what little food was left. Alarcon Hall was just one pocket. One bubble.

  They raided the basement kitchen on day two. Canned chili. Rice. Plastic-wrapped sleeves of crackers. A flat of bottled water. Sophie portioned it out, but Devon's crew took theirs back to the first floor, and Priya's crew kept theirs on the third floor, and by the end of the second day, there were two separate food stashes in a building with ten people.

  "This is insane," Connor said to no one in particular, standing in the lobby between the two factions like a kid watching his parents divide up the furniture. Outside, a homecoming banner reading UEC BIGHORNS: TRAMPLE THE COMPETITION flapped against the side of the building like a taunt.

  Nobody disagreed. Nobody changed anything either.

  The check-ins worked, though. At noon, all ten showed up. Tyler called out names from the whiteboard like he was taking attendance. Everyone answered. Green check marks went up. It felt almost normal, almost like a system, almost like they had things under control.

  Connor wrote in his textbook margins that night: Day 3. Ten people. All green. Feels like we might be okay. Can hear something moving in the building next door. Clicking sounds. Don't think about the clicking sounds.

  He was wrong.

***

Mark Reeves left on the morning of day five.

  He didn't announce it. Didn't ask permission, because there was no one to ask. He just found a gap in the first-floor barricade, a window Devon's crew had boarded with a mattress but hadn't actually locked, and slipped out before the noon check-in.

  Tyler noticed first. "Where's Mark?"

  Nine faces. Nine. Everyone looking around like he might be hiding behind the front desk.

  "His room's empty," Jada said. She'd gone up to check. "Window's still closed. He didn't go out that way."

  Devon found the loose mattress on the first floor. He shoved it back into place and kicked the wall and said, "Idiot."

They argued about it for an hour. Half of them thought Mark would come back. Half thought he was already dead, or turned, or being consumed from the inside out by Cordyceps, the fungus sprouting through his brain stem while he wandered the campus wondering why his thoughts were getting fuzzy. All of them were angry, and none of them agreed on what to be angry about.

  He came back at midnight, pounding on the main entrance, rattling the vending machines.

  Let me in. I'm fine. I just went to the parking structure. I'm fine. Please.

  Devon stood at the barricade, bat on his shoulder. Priya stood three feet behind him, arms crossed. The others hovered in a loose semicircle that was more like a mob than a meeting.

  "We don't open it," Devon said.

  "He's one of us," Ashley said from the back.

  "He left."

  "And now he's back."

  "How do we know he's not infected? How do we know something didn't get him out there? You've heard what's going on. People turn in hours. Sometimes minutes."

  "And sometimes they don't turn at all. He sounds like himself."

  "They all sound like themselves until they don't."

  Tyler was pacing. Nate was chewing his thumbnail down to the quick. Connor stood near the whiteboard and watched and didn't say anything, because he didn't know what to say, because both sides were right and both sides were wrong and that was the whole problem with ten people and no leader.

  "Vote," Priya said. "Right now. Hands up if we let him in."

  Five hands went up. Ashley, Tyler, Sophie, Nate, Connor. Connor raised his slow, not sure, not sure at all, but the pounding was getting desperate and the voice on the other side was cracking and he thought: what if it were me out there, in the dark, on a campus full of things that click.

  "Five to four," Priya said. Terrence hadn't voted. He was sitting on the lobby couch, staring at the floor.

  They opened the barricade just enough. Mark squeezed through, shaking, wild-eyed, holding a backpack he said was full of protein bars from his car. He said the campus was bad. He said he'd seen runners near the central quad, fast, twitchy, chasing shadows. He said he'd hidden behind the Melissa Smith Library for hours, crouched beneath a window, listening to things move through the stacks. He said nothing touched him.

  "You sleep in the lobby tonight," Devon said. It wasn't a suggestion. "Alone. Tomorrow, if you're still you, we talk."

  Mark slept on the couch. In the morning, he was fine. Green check mark.

  But Connor lay awake that night thinking about what they knew and what they didn't. The Fireflies had had a presence on campus; everyone had seen the graffiti, the white emblems painted on walls. If even the Fireflies couldn't hold this campus, what chance did ten college students have in a dorm with vending-machine barricades?

  On day seven, Connor was in the second-floor hallway when he heard a door open behind him.

***

  Mark was standing in the doorway of 209. Just standing. Eyes open, fixed on nothing. His body was there but the person who operated it was gone, like a car still running after the driver walked away.

  "Mark?"

  His head tilted. Not a human gesture. Something mechanical, something calibrated, something that spoke of Cordyceps having finished its work, the fungal tendrils having found the motor cortex and rewritten the instructions.

  Then he moved.

  It wasn't fast exactly. It was wrong. His body lunged forward in a way that didn't match any anatomy Connor had studied in three semesters of biology, joints bending at angles that spoke of something rewriting the software, the infection chewing through the brain stem and finding the motor controls and pressing every button at once. Mark hit the wall, bounced, found direction. And there was the sound, the one they'd been hearing through the walls for days, the one that came from the buildings across campus: a clicking, wet and rhythmic, emerging from Mark's throat like a language being spoken by something that had never needed words.

  Connor got a door between them. He slammed it and held it and felt the impacts on the other side, rhythmic, relentless, like a heartbeat made of bone and drywall.

  The screaming started down the hall. Nate. Nate had been coming out of the bathroom. Nate, who weighed maybe a hundred and forty pounds and made jokes nobody laughed at, was on the floor with Mark on top of him, and by the time Devon arrived with the bat, Nate's forearm was open and red and Mark was making that clicking sound, the echolocation of something that no longer needed eyes because the Cordyceps had taken those too, fungal growth already beginning to distort the features that had, a week ago, belonged to a senior who drove a Civic and talked about grad school.

  Devon swung. Once. Twice. A third time. Mark stopped moving.

  Nobody used the word killed. Devon said handled. On the whiteboard, Tyler drew a red line through Mark's name with a hand that wouldn't stop trembling.

  Nate went to his room voluntarily. "Just lock me in for a day," he said, pressing a wad of paper towels against the bite. His voice was steady, but his chin was shaking. "Just to be safe. One day. I'll be fine."

  Nobody said what they were all thinking: that "fine" was a word that had lost its meaning, that Cordyceps didn't negotiate, that the infection moved through the body like water through a crack in a dam, patient and absolute.

  Devon locked the door with a bike lock. Priya wedged a chair under the knob.

  Tyler wrote Nate's name in blue.

  That night, the factions hardened. Devon's crew took the first floor and sealed the stairwell door with furniture. Priya's crew stayed on three. Connor was left on two, alone, in the hallway where it had happened, with the stain on the carpet that nobody had cleaned because nobody wanted to go near it.

  The rules changed, though not by agreement. By emergence. Like weather. Like fungal growth.

  If you leave, you don't come back. If you miss check-in, you get one knock. If you don't answer the knock, your door gets sealed.

*** 

The check-ins fell apart by day twelve.

  Not all at once. In stages. Tyler stopped calling names and just counted heads. Seven, then six, then "Who's missing? Is Terrence here? Did anyone see Terrence?" Terrence came when he felt like it, which was less and less. He'd show up at the edge of the lobby, let himself be seen, then disappear back to 305 without a word.

  The food split was getting ugly. Devon's crew on the first floor had claimed the remaining vending machine stock. Priya's crew on three had the camping stove and the canned goods. Connor, on two, had nothing, and ate by trading favors: he'd do a room check for Priya in exchange for a can of chili, or carry water up from the basement for Devon in exchange for a sleeve of crackers.

  "This is how it starts," Jada said one night on the third floor, the four of them, Priya, Jada, Sophie, Connor, sitting around the camp stove eating cold rice because they were conserving propane. "This is what happens. Small groups, resource hoarding, tribalism. You read that journal from Ding Hall? The survivors there spent nearly a year waiting for rescue. Supplies became scarce. Some decided to give up hope, while the others took off to scavenge from Boulder City but never came back. That's what's going to happen to us."

  "We're ten people in a dorm. Eight, now."

  "Exactly. And we already can't cooperate."

  Outside, the clicking had gotten louder. Not just from adjacent buildings anymore. From below. From the ground itself, it seemed, as if the Cordyceps had gotten into the soil and the soil had learned to speak. Some nights, if Connor pressed his ear to the floor, he could hear something moving through the basement level, slow, heavy, a shuffling that didn't match the quick-twitch frenzy of runners. Something older. Something that had been down there for a while.

  The whiteboard stopped being updated regularly. Names stayed green-checked from days ago. Nate's name was still in blue, still in Room 118, though no one had heard anything from behind his door in two days. Not a voice, not a knock, not a sound. Connor pressed his ear against it once, late at night, and heard something that might have been breathing and might have been the building's ventilation and might have been the first wet clicks of a throat reorganizing itself around fungal tissue.

  He walked away.

  Ashley Kim came to check-in on day fifteen wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

  It was late September in Colorado. The Front Range heat was breaking but the days were still warm, and the dorm had no air conditioning because the power had been flickering since day nine. Someone in another building had jerry-rigged a generator, but Alarcon Hall had never been connected to it. Everyone else was in t-shirts, tank tops, as little as possible. Ashley was in long sleeves, and she was smiling, and she was fine, she was totally fine, she said so when Sophie asked and again when Connor asked and a third time when nobody asked at all.

  That night, Connor and Jada were doing a room check on three. Priya had stopped going; she said she didn't see the point. So Connor and Jada knocked on doors, listened for answers, moved on.

  Room 308. Knock.

  "I'm good!" Ashley called through the door. Bright. Quick. Too quick.

  "Can you open up, Ash?"

  "I'm changing."

  "We can wait."

  A pause. Then the door opened. Ashley stood there in the long-sleeved shirt, arms pinned to her sides. Behind her, on the desk, Connor could see a UEC pennant tacked to the corkboard, green and gold, a little Bighorn mascot grinning. The room of a person who had been, two weeks ago, a normal college sophomore.

  Jada looked at Connor. Connor looked at Ashley's left wrist, where the cuff was dark with something that could have been shadow but wasn't.

  "Ashley."

  "Don't."

  "Show us your arm."

  "It's a scrape. I scratched it on the barricade."

  "Then show us."

  Her face went through something Connor couldn't watch, a collapse that started at the eyes and moved down, the expression of a person who has been holding a door shut for days and has just felt the lock give.

  She pulled the sleeve back.

  The bite was on the inside of her forearm. Two crescents of broken skin, bruised at the edges, scabbed but angry. Days old. Unmistakably the shape of a human mouth. And at the edges, if you looked closely, which Connor did and immediately wished he hadn't, something was growing. Fine, thread-like filaments, barely visible, branching outward from the wound like the roots of a plant searching for purchase.

  "When?" Connor said.

  "Day eleven. First floor. Near Nate's door. The lock was loose. His hand..." She stopped. Started again. "It was so fast. Just fingers through the gap. I pulled away, but he got me and I didn't tell anyone because I felt fine. I feel fine. It's been four days and I'm still me."

  "Cordyceps doesn't always turn fast," Jada said. She said it flatly, like a fact from a textbook, which is how Jada said everything. "Sometimes it takes days. Sometimes longer. But it always takes. You know that."

  "But maybe it doesn't. Maybe some people are immune, maybe..."

  "Ashley."

  "Please don't lock me in. Please. I'll stay in my room, I'll stay away from everyone, but don't lock the door. If I'm fine, I need to be able to get out. And if I'm not..." Her voice broke. "If I'm not, I want to be able to choose."

  They locked her in. Connor threaded the bike lock through the handle and his hands were steady, and he wrote about that later in his textbook margins: My hands were steady. I hate that my hands were steady.

  That night, he lay on his bed two floors down and heard crying. Faint, filtered through concrete, but constant. It went on for hours. It sounded like grief, but not for someone else. For herself. For the future she could feel closing around her like a fist, the Cordyceps threading through her nervous system one synapse at a time, not fast enough to be merciful, not slow enough to pretend it wasn't happening.

  By morning, Room 308 was silent.

  Connor didn't go check. Neither did anyone else.

  On the whiteboard, nobody touched Ashley's name. It stayed in green, checked off from a day when she had stood in the lobby and smiled and said she was fine, and everyone had believed her, or pretended to, which amounted to the same thing.

  The doors multiplied after that, each one a small surrender.

***

Room 305: Terrence. Hadn't been seen in three days. Devon went up with the bat and knocked and got nothing. They sealed it. Nobody knew if Terrence was infected, dead, or just done talking. Nobody wanted to find out.

  Room 118: Nate. Sealed since day seven. The sounds from inside had changed over the days, from silence to shuffling to a rhythmic tapping, like fingers drumming on a desk without purpose or end. Once, late at night, Connor heard a voice from behind the door that said hello? in Nate's exact intonation, the same rising note at the end, the same breathless quality, except Nate had been bitten twelve days ago and whatever was using his vocal cords wasn't making conversation. It was echolocation. It was the click becoming a word, the fungus learning to mimic the host's language the way it had learned to mimic the host's gait, imperfect, almost right, and all the more terrible for the almost.

  Room 202: Tyler. This one hurt. Tyler had been at every check-in, had called every name, had been the closest thing they had to an organizer even though he was a freshman who flinched at loud sounds. On day eighteen he stopped showing up. Connor knocked. Tyler said, through the door, that he was tired. That he didn't see the point. That the check-ins were a joke. That they were all going to die in here, in this dorm, on this campus, and that nobody was coming because FEDRA had given up on everything outside the quarantine zones and they didn’t give a damn about ten college students in a building with vending-machine barricades.

  "Are you sick?" Connor asked.

  "Does it matter?"

  "Tyler. Are you bit?"

  "No. I'm just done."

  They didn't seal Tyler's door. But he never came out again.

  Six people, five doors, and a building that was starting to feel like a body with most of its organs shut down, still technically alive but only in the narrowest clinical sense.

  The hallways were the worst. Walking them at night was like moving through the digestive tract of something massive and patient. Every sealed door was a held breath. Every sound was a question you didn't want answered: the scratching from 305, the clicking from 118, the silence from 308 that was somehow louder than any of it. And underneath, always, that low shuffling from the basement, the thing they'd never investigated because some doors you don't open, not because of what's behind them but because of what you'd learn about yourself if you saw it.

  Connor stopped doing room checks. So did everyone else.

  By day twenty, the paranoia had replaced the infected as the primary threat, which was something Connor hadn't thought possible and now couldn't stop thinking about.

  Six people. Devon and Sophie on the first floor. Priya and Jada on the third. Connor floating between. And Terrence, in 305, who might or might not count.

  The food was almost gone. Sophie's stash on three was down to a few cans of corn and a half-bag of rice. Devon's vending machine haul had been eaten days ago; he'd been coming up to three to eat, which Priya allowed because she was practical and Devon still had the bat.

  But the dynamic had curdled. Every interaction was a negotiation. Every silence was suspicious.

  "You were gone for twenty minutes," Devon said to Sophie one evening.

  "I was in the bathroom."

  "For twenty minutes?"

  "What are you, my dad?"

  "I'm the guy who wants to know why you're spending twenty minutes behind a closed door when we've got rooms full of people who did the same thing before they stopped being people."

  Sophie stared at him. "You want to check me for bites, Devon? You want to do a full-body inspection? Because that's where this goes. That's what you're saying."

  He didn't answer. But the look on his face said he'd thought about it.

  The check-ins, what was left of them, became something closer to interrogations. Not formal, not organized, but charged with a suspicion that turned every question into an accusation and every answer into a defense. Priya started watching people's eyes during conversations, looking for the signs she'd read about before the internet died: the slight dilation, the tracking delay, the earliest neurological markers of Cordyceps colonization.

  "You're looking at me like I'm a lab rat," Jada told her.

  "I'm looking at you like someone who wants to survive."

  "Those aren't the same thing."

  Then they stopped entirely. The check-ins. The room checks. The whiteboard. All of it. Because the six of them realized, without saying it, that the system only worked when it was built on trust, and trust was the first thing they'd run out of, before the food, before the water, before the propane. They'd used it all up on Mark, on the vote to let him in, on the five-to-four margin that killed Nate and bit Ashley and started the cascade that turned their building from a shelter into a crypt.

  Connor wrote in his textbook: Day 22. We don't check anymore. Nobody wants to be seen. The whiteboard is still in the lobby. Green marks from two weeks ago next to names of people who are dead or turned or gone. Outside I can see the Richard Harington Science Lab, the big mirror, reflecting a sky that doesn't know anything ended. It looks like a tombstone that hasn't been filled in yet.

  Day twenty-four. Five people in the lobby, because Sophie had gone to her room the night before and hadn't come back, and when Jada knocked, Sophie said, I'm fine, just leave me alone, and they did, because what else could they do?

  The food was gone. Not low. Not rationed to crumbs. Gone. The last of it, a single can of corn split five ways, had been consumed that morning with fingers because they'd lost the only can opener and had to use Devon's bat to smash it open, which sprayed corn and liquid across the lobby floor and made Priya laugh in a way that wasn't really laughing.

  Devon stood in the middle of the lobby and looked down the first-floor hallway.

  "There's food behind those doors."

  "There's other things behind those doors," Priya said.

  "Some of them were sealed because people might be infected. Not because they were. Tyler wasn't bit. He said he wasn't bit."

  "Tyler also stopped talking two days later."

  "Terrence had a whole stash. Remember? He was hoarding. That stuff is still in there."

  "Along with whatever Terrence is now."

  Connor looked at the whiteboard. Ten names. The red line through Mark. The blue on Nate and Ashley. The rest in various states of green and blank. A record of collapse written in dry-erase marker by people who thought a system could save them.

  "We could leave," he said. "All of us. Together. Just go. Head for I-25. Head for one of the quarantine zones."

  "Go where?" Devon said. "You seen outside? You know what's out there? The whole campus is crawling with them. And it's not just runners anymore, you hear the sounds at night, the deep ones? Those are things that have been growing for weeks. Things that used to be faculty, students, people who were here before us."

  Nobody had looked outside in over a week. The windows were still covered. The last person who'd checked, Tyler, had come back pale and quiet and had gone to his room and never left.

  "I'm not opening those doors," Jada said.

  "Then we starve," Devon said.

  Silence. The building breathed around them: pipes, ventilation, and underneath it, the other sounds, the ones that lived behind sealed doors and came out at night. The clicking from 118. The scratching from 305. The nothing from 308 that was the worst sound of all. And below everything, from the basement, the heavy, patient shuffling of something that had been down there since before they'd arrived, something that might have been a custodian or a professor or a student who'd gone downstairs during homecoming week and never come back up.

  They went to their corners without deciding. Connor on the lobby couch. Priya and Jada on the third-floor landing. Devon somewhere on one. The democracy of the whiteboard, which had never really been a democracy, gave way to five people in separate rooms waiting for someone else to make the choice.

  Connor lay on the couch and listened.

  Sometime after two in the morning, he heard it. A click. A scrape. A creak. Close. First floor. A door opening.

  He sat up. The lobby was dark, the only light a thin line of moonlight coming through a crack in the boarded windows, catching the edge of a green-and-gold GO BIG HORNS pennant someone had stuck to the front desk in the first week, back when decorating felt like hope.

  He moved toward the hallway on bare feet and saw it: Room 118, Nate's room, standing open. The bike lock was on the floor. The chair was tipped on its side.

  The room beyond was a black rectangle.

  He didn't go closer. He backed away, one step, then another, keeping his eyes on the doorway. From inside, he heard something that might have been breathing or might have been the building settling or might have been a voice trying to form a word it no longer had the architecture to produce. The clicking had stopped. That was worse. The clicking was echolocation; silence meant it had already found what it was looking for.

  He found Priya on the third-floor landing. Jada was gone. Her door was closed.

  "Someone opened 118," he whispered.

  "Who?"

  "I don't know."

  "Devon?"

  "I don't know."

  They sat on the landing until morning, not sleeping, not talking, just listening to the building rearrange itself in the dark. Listening to the campus outside, where the infected moved in patterns that Connor had started to think of as ecosystems, runners in packs near the central quad, the slower ones, the older ones, drifting through the corridors of the Richard Harington Science Lab and the Melissa Smith Library, living in the architecture of a university that had stopped being a university and become something else entirely: a colony. A host. A body the Cordyceps had claimed building by building the way it claimed a human brain, neuron by neuron.

  In the morning, 118 was empty. No body. No signs of struggle. An open window Connor didn't remember being uncovered, letting in a cold Colorado morning that smelled like pine and smoke and something organic and sweet, the smell of Cordyceps in bloom, the fungus fruiting somewhere nearby, sending spores into the clean mountain air.

  Devon was gone. His bat was leaning against the lobby's front desk, which was somehow worse than if he'd taken it.

  Connor and Priya left that afternoon. They moved the vending machines themselves, which took almost an hour because they were shaking and weak and the machines were heavier than he remembered, heavier than they'd been four weeks ago when ten strangers had shoved them into place and thought they were building a wall against the end of the world.

  Connor stopped at the whiteboard. Ten names. He picked up the red marker and uncapped it and wrote at the bottom, in letters that shook because his hands were no longer steady, because the steadiness had run out along with everything else:

  STOP OPENING DOORS.

  He put the marker down. He and Priya went through the gap in the barricade and into the daylight, which was thin and autumnal and tasted like ash. They moved low across the central quad, past the homecoming banners, past the fountain choked with dead leaves and something that might have been growth, organic matter climbing the stone basin in patterns too deliberate to be moss. The science building loomed to the east, its mirrored facade reflecting a campus that looked almost peaceful from a distance, almost like a place where people had gone to class and argued about football and worn green-and-gold on game days.

  They didn't look back.

  Behind them, the building kept breathing.

***

Years later, a man came through the lobby of Alarcon Hall alone.

  He was older, weathered in ways that had nothing to do with age, with a revolver on his hip and a gas mask in his hand. He'd left a girl and a horse on the other side of a locked gate, told her to stay put while he found a way through. He was looking for a generator. He was looking for the Fireflies.

  He searched the dorm rooms on the second floor, opening doors that hadn't been opened in twenty years. Some rooms were empty. Some were not. The rooms that were not empty told their stories in stains and angles and the position of objects that had been dropped or thrown or clutched until the hands holding them stopped working. In one room, the desk had been shoved against the door from the inside. In another, the window was shattered outward, as if someone had chosen the fall over what was coming through the wall. On a desk in 200-B, he found a journal, its pages stiff with age. He picked it up and turned a few pages: names, dates, check marks, a record of something that had started as a system and ended as a monument to the gap between intention and outcome.

  "I wonder how long you held out," he said, to no one.

  Then the spores hit. Thick, golden, pouring through a hole in the corridor floor in clouds that turned the air to amber. He pulled on his gas mask and dropped through.

  Below, the hallway was a different world. Fungal plating covered the walls and ceiling, turning drywall and carpet into substrate, turning a dormitory into a garden. Clickers moved through the darkness in slow orbits, their clicking a constant, mechanical rhythm, the sound of something that had once been human running on an operating system that no longer required consciousness. And at the far end of the hall, something bigger. Something that had been growing in the dark for years, fed by the spores and the moisture and the steady supply of organic matter that the building provided. A bloater. It sat like a monument, fungal armor plating its body in layers, barely recognizable as having once been a person.

  The man moved through them. He was careful. He was experienced. He had done this before, in other buildings, in other cities, in other lives. He killed the clickers with quiet efficiency. He dealt with the bloater. He found the stairwell on the other side, climbed up into clean air, removed his mask.

  He went outside and pushed the generator into place and started it up, and the gate opened, and the girl rode through on the horse, and they continued on toward the science building, toward the Fireflies, toward Salt Lake City, toward everything that came after.

  He never went back to Alarcon Hall. He had no reason to. It was just another building on a dead campus, another dormitory filled with infected, another obstacle between him and the generator that opened the gate.

  But the whiteboard was still there. In the lobby, propped against the front desk, beside a green-and-gold pennant and a baseball bat that no one had claimed. Ten names. One red line. Blue marks. Green checks from weeks ago. A document of something that started as a system and ended as silence.

  At the bottom, in shaking red letters:

  STOP OPENING DOORS.

  Below that, in different handwriting, smaller, pressed hard enough to squeak against the surface:

  Someone already did.

Author's Note: "Room Checks" is a work of short fiction set in the world of The Last of Us, the video game series created by Neil Druckmann and developed by Naughty Dog. It takes place in Alarcon Hall, one of the dormitory buildings at the University of Eastern Colorado (UEC), the fictional campus Joel and Ellie visit on horseback during Chapter 8 ("The University") of The Last of Us Part I. In the game, Joel passes through a dormitory filled with infected, including clickers and a bloater, while searching for a generator to open a locked gate so that Ellie and their horse, Callus, can continue toward the Richard Harington Science Lab, where the Fireflies once researched the Cordyceps brain infection. The student's journal Joel finds in one of the dorm rooms, and his quiet remark upon reading it, are canon; this story imagines the people who wrote it. All characters in this story, besides Joel and Ellie, are original. The Last of Us and all associated intellectual property belong to Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment.