The Interrogation

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

The Interrogation

Part One: The Room

The chair was bolted to the floor. That was the first thing Tess noticed, not the blood (old, someone else's) or the overhead light (fluorescent, one tube dead, the other flickering with a faint electrical whine), but the chair. Bolted down with four heavy lag screws driven straight through linoleum into concrete. Someone had gone to real trouble for that chair.

  She tested the handcuffs. Standard issue, steel, ratcheted one click too tight on her left wrist. Deliberate. A small, petty cruelty meant to set the tone.

  Tess had been in rooms like this before.

  The door opened. The officer who entered was not what she expected. He was older, mid-fifties, with a lean face and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He carried a manila folder and a paper cup of coffee. No sidearm visible. He sat across from her, placed the folder on the table between them, and took a long sip.

  "Teresa Servopoulos."

  "Just Tess."

  "Right. Just Tess." He opened the folder. "You were picked up at the wall near Sector 4 with a bag containing, let's see, eight bottles of amoxicillin, three boxes of 9-millimeter ammunition, and... two cans of peaches. The peaches are a nice touch."

  "I'm sentimental."

  The officer, whose name was Captain Clayton Wesley, did not smile. He turned a page in the folder. "You've been in the QZ for what, three years now?"

  "Roughly."

  "And in that time you've been detained twice for curfew violations, questioned once in connection with a weapons exchange on the south side, and now this." He looked up. "You're building quite a record, Tess."

  "I'm an overachiever."

  Wesley closed the folder. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach in the manner of a man who had learned, through years of practice, that silence was more useful than shouting.

  "Who's your supplier outside the wall?"

  Tess said nothing. She looked at the dead fluorescent tube and thought about Joel.

 Part Two: The Underworld

  Joel found out she was gone when she didn't show up.

  That was the arrangement. Simple, clean, no room for ambiguity. Tuesday night, eleven o'clock, northeast corner of the old parking structure off Salem Street. He would be there. She would be there. The goods would move.

  At 11:40, Tess was not there. By midnight, Joel knew.

  He walked back to the safehouse, a gutted apartment above a shuttered laundromat on the edge of Sector 6. He sat on the mattress in the dark and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and thought.

  Joel was not a man built for thinking, or so people assumed. He was tall and broad and had a way of entering a room that made it feel smaller. His hands were rough, his knuckles scarred, and his eyes held the flat, appraising quality of someone who had long ago stopped seeing other people as anything but variables: threats, obstacles, or tools. Twenty years of this world had stripped him down to something functional and cold, a machine for surviving.

  But Tess had seen something else in him. Or she had decided to act as if she did, which amounted to the same thing.

  They had been working together for only two months. It was Bill who had connected them, Bill with his paranoid compound out in Lincoln, his trip wires and shotgun traps and absolute refusal to deal with anyone he hadn't vetted three times over. Tess had done supply runs for Bill for the better part of a year. Small jobs, careful work. She was one of the maybe four people Bill tolerated, which in Bill's world was practically a declaration of love.

  "She's smart," Bill had told Joel, which was the closest thing to a compliment Joel had ever heard from the man. "Smarter than you by a mile. Don't screw it up."

  Joel had not screwed it up. Not yet. But now Tess was in a FEDRA holding facility somewhere in the zone, and the clock was running.

  He stood. He put on his jacket. He went to find a man named Decker.

 Part Three: Pressure

  "Let me explain your situation," Wesley said.

  He had left her alone for an hour. A standard technique. Time to sit, to feel the cuffs, to listen to the fluorescent tube flicker and die and flicker again. Time to imagine what came next. The hour was not for gathering information. It was for letting fear do its work.

  Tess had used the hour to take a nap.

  "Smuggling contraband within the quarantine zone carries a mandatory sentence," Wesley continued. "You know what that sentence is."

  "I've heard rumors."

  "It's not a rumor. It's a firing squad. Four soldiers, one blank round so everyone can sleep at night. Very efficient."

  "You're trying to scare me, Captain."

  "I'm trying to inform you."

  Tess tilted her head. The overhead light carved deep shadows under her cheekbones. She was not a large woman, five-six, lean, with dark hair cut short because long hair was a liability in this world. But she had a quality, a density, a sense that behind her eyes, calculations were running at a speed and depth that the person across from her could not match.

  "Here's what I think," she said. "I think if you were going to put me against a wall, you'd have done it already. Standard protocol. No tribunal, no interview, just a walk to the yard and four rifles. That's how FEDRA handles it with the nobodies." She paused. "But you're sitting here with a folder and a cup of coffee, which means I'm not a nobody. Which means you want something."

  Wesley regarded her for a long moment.

  "I want your network," he said. "Names, routes, buyers, the whole operation."

  "I don't have a network."

  "Everyone has a network."

  "I'm a freelancer. I pick things up here, I move them there. Very simple."

  "And the man you work with?"

  Tess's expression did not change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. It was a performance so complete it almost didn't look like a performance at all.

  "I work alone," she said.

 Part Four: Decker

  Decker ran a ration card exchange out of the basement of what had once been a Dunkin' Donuts on Hanover Street. He was a thin, nervous man with bad teeth and a talent for knowing things he shouldn't. Joel found him counting cards at a folding table under a single bare bulb.

  "No," Decker said, before Joel had spoken.

  "You don't know what I'm going to ask."

  "I know who you are. I know who you run with. And I know she got picked up tonight, which means you're here to ask me something that's going to get me killed." He shook his head. "No."

  Joel pulled out a chair and sat down. The chair scraped against the concrete floor with a sound that made Decker flinch.

  "I need to know where they're holding her."

  "I don't know that."

  "Find out."

  "Joel..."

  "I also need to know who's running the interrogation. Name, rank, habits. Where he eats, where he sleeps, who he talks to."

  Decker stared at him. "You understand what you're asking? This isn't some dock worker shaking down runners for a cut. This is FEDRA. Military. The people with the guns and the authority to use them."

  "I know who they are."

  "Then you know I can't help you."

  Joel reached into his jacket and placed something on the table. It was a small glass bottle, sealed, with a faded pharmaceutical label. Decker looked at it. His eyes went wide.

  "That's..."

  "Insulin. Twelve doses. Enough to keep your brother alive for two months." Joel leaned forward. "I know about Eddie, Decker. I know he's diabetic. I know you've been trading everything you've got to keep him supplied, and I know you're running out."

  Decker's mouth opened. Closed.

  "Get me what I need," Joel said. "And this is yours."

  The silence in the basement was total. The bare bulb swayed slightly in a draft from somewhere, making shadows swing across the walls like slow pendulums.

  "There's a guy," Decker said quietly. "Stafford. He works intake processing at the Sector 2 facility. He's dirty, been selling information for months. If your partner's in the system, he'll know where."

  Joel picked up the insulin and held it where Decker could see it.

  "Set up a meeting."

 Part Five: The Long Game

  Wesley came back at what Tess guessed was three in the morning. He had a new cup of coffee. He did not offer her one.

  "Tell me about Bill."

  Tess felt something cold move through her chest. She kept her face still.

  "Bill who?"

  "Bill from Lincoln. Paranoid gentleman, lives outside the zone in a fortified residential block. Extensive stockpile of weapons, supplies, and fuel. We've known about him for years. Low priority, since he stays out of our way, but we know." Wesley sipped his coffee. "You've done work for him."

  "I don't know anyone named Bill."

  "We have records, Tess. Trade manifests we've recovered from other smugglers we've processed. Your name comes up. His comes up. The connections aren't hard to draw."

  Tess shrugged, a gesture made awkward by the handcuffs. "People say a lot of things in those chairs, Captain. Doesn't make any of it true."

  Wesley set down his coffee. "I'm going to be honest with you, because I think you're smart enough to appreciate honesty. I don't care about the peaches. I don't care about the amoxicillin. I don't even particularly care about the ammunition, though my superiors might feel differently."

  He leaned forward.

  "What I care about is the pipeline. Supplies are flowing out of this zone at a rate that is becoming, frankly, embarrassing. My commanding officer is not a patient woman, and she has made it clear that heads will roll, mine included, if this isn't shut down. So I need to demonstrate results." He tapped the folder. "You can be a result in one of two ways. You can give me the network and walk out of here with a reduced sentence, maybe kitchen duty for six months. Or you can give me nothing, and I process you as an example."

  "An example."

  "The kind that discourages others."

  Tess looked at him. Really looked. She saw the lines around his eyes, the slight tremor in his left hand (too much coffee, not enough sleep), the way his jaw tightened when he mentioned his commanding officer. This was a man under pressure, squeezing because he was being squeezed.

  That was useful information.

  "Captain Wesley," she said. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Go ahead."

  "How long have you been doing this job?"

  He blinked. "What?"

  "The interrogations. The folders. The good-cop routine with the coffee. How many years?"

  "That's not relevant."

  "It is to me. Because I've been sitting here for, what, four hours? And in that time you haven't raised your voice, you haven't threatened physical harm, and you haven't brought in anyone else to play the bad cop. Which tells me either you're very disciplined, or you don't have the stomach for the ugly stuff." She paused. "I'm guessing it's both."

  Wesley said nothing.

  "Here's my counter-offer," Tess said. "You let me sit here as long as you want. Ask me whatever you want. I'll be polite, I'll be cooperative in tone, and I will give you absolutely nothing. And when your CO comes asking why you've spent all night talking to a smuggler with no results, you can tell her I was a tough nut. That buys you, what, another day? Two? Before she puts someone else in that chair across from me. Someone who doesn't bring coffee."

  She held his gaze.

  "We both know how this works, Captain. The question is how long you want to drag it out."

  Wesley looked at her for a very long time. Then he picked up his coffee, stood, and left the room.

 Part Six: Stafford

  The meeting happened in a condemned building near the waterfront, the kind of place where the walls were green with mold and the floorboards complained under every step. Stafford was a young FEDRA corporal with a patchy beard and the jittery energy of a man who knew he was in over his head. He kept looking at the door.

  "Sector 2 facility, third floor," Stafford said. "Interview room six. She's been there since about nine tonight. Captain Wesley's running it personally."

  "Wesley." Joel filed the name. "Tell me about him."

  "Career officer. Been in the QZ since the early days. Runs interrogations for the smuggling division. He's not... he's not a monster, if that's what you're thinking. Doesn't beat people. Doesn't have to, usually. He's just patient."

  "Everyone breaks eventually. That what you're saying?"

  "I'm saying he's good at his job."

  Joel stood by the window, looking out at the dark outline of the wall that ringed the zone. Somewhere beyond it, in every direction, the world was green and wild and full of things that would kill you. Inside the wall was supposed to be safe. The great lie of the quarantine zones.

  "What's Wesley's pressure point?"

  Stafford shifted uncomfortably. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean what does he care about. What can be used."

  "Jesus, man, I don't know. He's a FEDRA captain. He follows orders."

  "Everyone cares about something." Joel turned from the window. His face was half in shadow, half in the faint light from outside. "Think."

  Stafford swallowed. "There's... look, this is just talk I hear around the facility. Wesley has a kid. A daughter. She's maybe sixteen, seventeen. She's in the QZ schooling program, works a rotation in the agricultural sector. Wesley keeps her out of everything, very protective. Doesn't even let other officers near her."

  Joel said nothing. His face was unreadable.

  "That's all I've got," Stafford said. "Can I go?"

  Joel reached into his coat and produced a small bundle of ration cards. He placed them on the windowsill.

  "You were never here," Joel said. "I was never here."

  Stafford grabbed the cards and was gone.

  Joel stood alone in the condemned building and thought about daughters. He thought about it for a long time, standing very still in the dark, and then he put it away in the place where he put everything, the deep and private place that Tess had once, in an unguarded moment, called his vault.

  He would not use the girl. There were lines, even now, even after everything.

  He would find another way.

 Part Seven: The Fracture

  Dawn was coming. Tess could tell by the way the guards changed outside the door, the shuffle of boots, the murmured exchanges. A shift change meant morning. Morning meant she had been in the chair for roughly eight hours.

  Her left wrist had gone numb.

  Wesley returned. This time he looked tired. The coffee was gone, replaced by a bottle of water, which he set in front of her.

  "Drink."

  "Uncuff me."

  He hesitated, then produced a key and released her left hand. Tess picked up the water with her right, drank half of it, then flexed her left hand slowly, methodically, restoring circulation. She did not rub her wrist. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing discomfort.

  "I've been authorized to make you a final offer," Wesley said.

  "Final. That's dramatic."

  "Give me one name. One. A supplier, a buyer, a contact outside the wall. Just one name, and I can reclassify you from a capital case to a labor detail. Six months, maybe less."

  Tess set down the water.

  "You know what's interesting, Captain? In the old world, there were lawyers. Due process. Rights. You couldn't just put someone in a room for eight hours and tell them to give up their friends or die. There were rules."

  "There are still rules."

  "Your rules. Written by you, enforced by you, for your benefit." She leaned back. "In the old world, you'd be a cop. Maybe a decent one. But here, you're just a man with a gun and a chair bolted to the floor, and the only difference between you and the guy running the protection racket on Fifth Street is the uniform."

  Something moved behind Wesley's eyes. A crack, thin as a hairline fracture in glass.

  "I'm trying to help you," he said, and for the first time, Tess believed he meant it.

  "I know," she said. "That's the saddest part."

 Part Eight: Leverage

  Joel found his angle at six in the morning, in a bar that didn't technically exist.

  It was a converted supply closet behind a barbershop in Sector 3, run by a woman named Grace who brewed something approximating whiskey from diverted grain rations. The clientele was exclusively people who had business they couldn't conduct in daylight. Joel had been here before. He did not enjoy it.

  The man he needed was named Petrov. Former FEDRA supply sergeant, discharged for skimming, now working the black market with the quiet desperation of someone who knew exactly how bad things could get. Petrov was drinking alone in the corner, which was the only way Petrov drank.

  Joel sat across from him.

  "I need dirt on Captain Clayton Wesley. Sector 2 facility."

  Petrov laughed. It was not a happy sound. "Wesley? Good luck. The man's clean. Straight arrow, by-the-book, model officer."

  "Nobody's clean."

  "Wesley is. Doesn't drink, doesn't gamble, doesn't skim supplies. He's a true believer, Joel. Thinks FEDRA's actually saving civilization."

  Joel processed this. A true believer was harder to crack than a corrupt one. Corruption gave you handholds. Belief was a smooth wall.

  "What about the people around him?"

  Petrov squinted. "What do you mean?"

  "His chain of command. The CO putting pressure on him. Who is she?"

  "Colonel Danielle Pierce. She runs the whole smuggling enforcement division for the Boston QZ. Tough woman. Political. She's been under heat from regional command to show results."

  "So she's squeezing Wesley."

  "She's squeezing everyone."

  Joel leaned forward. "What if Wesley delivers something big? Not a smuggler, not a runner. Something that makes Pierce look good to her bosses."

  Petrov considered this. "Like what?"

  "Like a lead on a major supply leak inside FEDRA itself."

  Petrov went very still. "You're talking about an internal investigation."

  "I'm talking about giving Wesley a bigger fish. Something worth more than one woman in a chair."

  "And where would this lead come from?"

  Joel looked at him steadily. "From you."

  Petrov's face went through several changes in rapid succession: confusion, understanding, fear, and finally, a kind of grim resignation.

  "You want me to burn someone."

  "I want you to give Wesley a name. Someone in the FEDRA supply chain who's been diverting materials. Someone real, someone dirty, someone who matters more than a smuggler with two cans of peaches."

  "And in exchange?"

  "In exchange, I make sure certain records of your own supply chain activities stay buried. Records I happen to have access to."

  Petrov stared at him.

  "You're a bastard, Joel."

  "I've been told."

  "If this goes wrong..."

  "It won't go wrong for you. Wesley gets a promotion-worthy bust, his CO gets her results, and my partner walks out the door as part of the deal. Everyone wins."

  "Except the guy I'm giving up."

  Joel said nothing. His silence was its own kind of answer.

  Petrov finished his drink. "There's a quartermaster in Sector 5. Name of Higgins. He's been running a diversion scheme for over a year, skimming medical supplies and selling them through the Fireflies. It's substantial. The kind of thing that would make a colonel very happy."

  "Can you document it?"

  "I've kept records. Insurance." He smiled bitterly. "Guess I'm cashing in that policy."

  Joel stood. "Have it ready in two hours. I'll send someone to pick it up."

  "Joel." Petrov's voice stopped him at the door. "How do you know Wesley will take the deal? He might just take the information and keep your partner too."

  "Because I'm not going to give it to him directly. I'm going to make sure it lands on Colonel Pierce's desk first, with a note suggesting Wesley is the one who developed the lead. Wesley gets the credit whether he wants it or not. And then I'm going to have a conversation with Wesley about the value of professional courtesy."

  Petrov shook his head slowly. "Your partner teach you that? The chess-move stuff?"

  Joel paused.

  "She's teaching me a lot of things," he said.

 Part Nine: Endgame

  By noon, the folder was on Pierce's desk.

  By two o'clock, three FEDRA squads had raided Quartermaster Higgins's operation in Sector 5 and seized enough diverted medical supplies to fill a truck. It was the biggest internal bust in the Boston QZ in over a year. Colonel Pierce was, by all accounts, pleased.

  By three o'clock, Joel was standing in an alley behind the Sector 2 facility, waiting.

  Wesley came out the back entrance at 3:15. He was alone, as Joel had known he would be. Wesley was the type to take his breaks in solitude, a few minutes of quiet away from the weight of the work. Joel had watched the pattern for two hours from a fire escape across the street.

  "Captain Wesley."

  Wesley turned. His hand moved to his hip, but Joel was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, posture carefully calibrated to read as non-threatening. It was a trick Tess had taught him. People read your body before they hear your words. Control the body, control the conversation.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "Nobody important. I just wanted to congratulate you on the Higgins bust. That's going to look real good on your record."

  Wesley's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about that?"

  "Same way I know you've had a woman in Interview Room Six for the last eighteen hours. Same way I know she hasn't given you a damn thing, and she's not going to."

  Wesley studied him. Joel could see the calculation happening, the weighing of risks and options.

  "You're the partner," Wesley said.

  "I told you, I'm nobody."

  "She said the same thing. You two rehearse?"

  "Captain, I'm going to be straight with you because I think you appreciate that. The Higgins lead didn't come from your people. It came from me. I put it on your colonel's desk, and I made sure your name was attached."

  Wesley said nothing. His face was stone.

  "Now, that can go one of two ways," Joel continued. "You accept the win, let my partner walk on a reduced charge, time served, and everyone moves on. Or you hold onto her, get nothing, and I start making sure Colonel Pierce learns exactly where that Higgins lead really came from. Which would raise some uncomfortable questions about how a smuggler had better intelligence than her entire enforcement division."

  "You're threatening a FEDRA officer."

  "I'm offering a trade. You're good at those. It's basically your whole job."

  Wesley looked at him for a long time. The alley was narrow and dim, and somewhere in the distance, a patrol vehicle rumbled past.

  "She must be something," Wesley said quietly. "For you to go through all this."

  Joel didn't answer that.

  "Interview Room Six," Joel said. "I'll be out here."

  Wesley stood there a moment longer. Then he turned and went back inside. 

Part Ten: Release 

The door opened at 4:07 PM.

  Tess walked out into the pale afternoon light of the Boston QZ, blinking against the brightness. She had a red mark on her left wrist and dark circles under her eyes and she moved with the careful, deliberate gait of someone who had spent eighteen hours in a metal chair.

  Joel was across the street, leaning against a wall.

  She walked over to him. Neither of them spoke. They fell into step together and walked north, through the checkpoints and the crowds and the crumbling blocks of what had once been a great American city, until they reached the laundromat and climbed the stairs and shut the door behind them.

  Tess sat on the mattress. Joel locked the door, checked the window, pulled the shade. Routine. Ritual. The small liturgies of survival.

  He reached under the floorboard where they kept the emergency supplies and pulled out a can. He held it up so she could see the label, faded but legible: Brunswick Sardines in Spring Water.

  "Big spender," Tess said.

  He sat next to her on the mattress, produced a knife, and opened the can with a practiced twist. He handed it to her. She ate three sardines with her fingers, then passed the can to him. He ate two. She took it back.

  They sat like that for a while, passing the can between them, not talking. The light through the shade was gold and gray. Outside, the QZ hummed with its usual commerce of misery and adaptation.

  "How'd you do it?" Tess asked eventually.

  "Called in some favors."

  "Must have been big favors."

  "Medium."

  She almost smiled. It was a small thing, barely a movement, but Joel saw it. He saw everything about her, even when he wished he didn't.

  "Wesley wasn't bad," she said. "For FEDRA. He was almost decent."

  "Almost decent'll still put you against a wall."

  "Yeah." She ate the last sardine. "Yeah, it will."

  Silence again. But it was a different kind of silence than the one Joel had known for twenty years. That silence had been empty, a void where everything he'd lost used to be. This one had weight. Texture. It was the silence of two people sitting close enough to touch, choosing not to, but knowing they could.

  "Bill's going to be furious," Tess said. "We lost the whole shipment."

  "Bill's always furious."

  "He'll blame you."

  "He always blames me."

  This time she did smile, just barely, and looked down at the empty can in her hands. "We need to be smarter. Plan better. I should have seen the patrol rotation on the Sector 4 wall; it was my mistake."

  "We'll figure it out."

  "I've been thinking about routes. There's a way through the old storm drains on the east side. Nobody watches them because they flood in the spring. But if we time it right..."

  She was already planning. Eighteen hours in a FEDRA interrogation room, and she was already three moves ahead. Joel watched her talk, her hands moving, her eyes sharp and restless, and he felt something shift in his chest, a tectonic thing, slow and deep and irreversible.

  He would not name it. He didn't have to. It was enough to sit here on this mattress in this ruined city, passing a can of sardines back and forth, listening to her talk about storm drains and patrol routes, and to know, with a certainty that frightened him, that he would do anything to keep this.

  Not love. They would never call it that. Love was a word from the old world, from before, and it carried too much weight for people like them.

  But Tess glanced at him, mid-sentence, and her expression softened for just a fraction of a second, and Joel looked away because he couldn't hold it.

  "Hey." She nudged his shoulder with hers. "We're okay, Texas."

  He nodded. He set the empty can on the floor.

  "Yeah," he said. "We're okay."

  Outside, the sun went down over the Boston Quarantine Zone, and the patrols changed shift, and the world went on being broken. But in the room above the laundromat, two people who had survived another day sat together in the gathering dark, and neither one moved to turn on the light.

  They became, in time, the most feared smuggling operation in the Boston QZ. Not because of Joel's capacity for violence, though that was considerable. And not because of Tess's brilliance, though that was unmatched. But because of this: when you went after one of them, the other one came. And they did not stop.

  Captain Clayton Wesley was reassigned to the Hartford QZ six months later. He never spoke about the woman in Interview Room Six, but colleagues noted that he kept a can of sardines on his desk for years afterward, though no one ever saw him eat them.

  Some things don't need to be named to be real.

Author's Note

The Interrogation is a work of fan fiction set in the world of The Last of Us, created by Neil Druckmann and developed by Naughty Dog. All characters, settings, and lore drawn from the game, including Tess, Joel Miller, Bill, the Fireflies, the Cordyceps brain infection, and the Boston Quarantine Zone, are the intellectual property of Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment. This story is an unofficial, non-commercial creative work written out of admiration for the source material and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Naughty Dog, Sony Interactive Entertainment, or any related entities.

The timeline of this story places it roughly in the early 2030s, a few years before the events of the main game (set in 2033). By this point, Joel has been surviving in the post-outbreak world for approximately two decades. The game establishes that Joel arrived in the Boston QZ at some point after years of doing, in his own words, things he is not proud of, and that by the time we meet him, he and Tess are already a well-established smuggling partnership with a fearsome reputation. What the game does not show us is how that partnership began, how two deeply guarded, deeply damaged people came to trust each other, or what it cost them to build something worth protecting in a world designed to destroy exactly that.