This is a hypothetical draft of my story treatment for a sequel to one of the most popular “zombie apocalypse” games of all time—The Last of Us, by Naughty Dog for the PlayStation 3. The majority of this script was compiled in 2015 before the actual sequel The Last of Us Part II was officially announced, and any similarities with that game—of which there are several—are truly and purely coincidental:
1. In the summer of 2013, the continental United States is ravaged by a viral pandemic from a Cordyceps fungus that transforms its victims into cannibalistic monsters called “Infected.” In a suburban neighborhood outside Austin, Texas where the pandemic originates, Michael and his wife Cindi live with their son Mikey Jr. For the past several days Mikey has been an in-patient receiving treatment for a recent fit of epileptic seizures, and his parents have just purchased a puppy as a surprise for him when he returns home. On the night of the outbreak, Michael and Cindi are watching the local news when they see an emergency report of severe riots erupting outside the same hospital where Mikey is staying, and there are even rumors that the entire area is being evacuated by the National Guard. Concerned for their son’s safety, Michael instructs Cindi to load up the family car so that they can join the evacuation to her sister’s cabin further north; in the meantime he will make his way across town and retrieve Mikey from the hospital.
Arriving outside the hospital, Michael discovers that the place has been overrun with crazed and insane patients who appear to attack anyone they spot on sight. Stumbling upon the body of a dead police officer at the entrance, Michael retrieves his pistol and starts trudging through the building up to the children’s ward, fighting off attacks from several patients along the way. He eventually reaches Mikey’s room, where he finds his son cowering beneath the bed and apparently unharmed; Michael scoops the boy up in his arms, informing him that his mother is waiting for them both back at the house. He then tries to worm his way back down to the first floor, avoiding more crazed patients in the process, but before they are able to exit the building a gas leak ruptures and causes a huge explosion that rocks the entire building. Both Michael and his son are knocked unconscious, and when the former awakens he learns that the hospital has collapsed around them and that Mikey, while still alive, has taken a nasty hit to the head. Once more he picks the boy up and attempts to limp towards the open entrance, but they are suddenly swarmed by a mob of Infected, and Michael must watch helplessly as Mikey Jr. is bitten.
2. Decades later, Michael is still living outside Austin, TEXAS—now largely alone except for his dog Lucy for company, in a small cottage north of the city located in the midst of a secluded forest. Together the two of them spend their days foraging among the woods for food, or else crossbow-hunting the many herds of African gazelle that have dominated the region over the years. During one such excursion they stumble upon a young woman, nearly-unconscious as she lies bleeding by a river; she appears to have taken a gunshot wound in the gut, after being pursued through the forest by several armed men. Michael and Lucy manage to chase the men off and carry the unknown woman back to their cottage, where Michael examines her injuries and realizes that she will require medication if she is to survive.
Accompanied by Lucy he journeys to an abandoned veterinarian’s office in a nearby town to retrieve the necessary supplies; in the course of his travels Michael encounters both many Infected wandering the area, as well as more men who are apparently searching for the unknown woman. Michael eventually learns that they are a band of scavengers that calls themselves the Carroñeros, led by a man named García. At one point Michael is nearly surrounded by García and his soldiers, and in a standoff the former attempts to warn him that the unknown woman is not to be trusted—he urges Michael to surrender her over to the Carroñeros, but Michael refuses. Before García can escalate further the group is attacked offscreen by a horde of advanced Infected that make strange clicking noises, and Michael and Lucy are able to escape.
3. Back at the cabin, Michael administers the pilfered medications to his guest. While she lies in recovery he combs through her pack in order to learn more about her identity and discovers several pertinent items, including a circular dog tag and military-grade assault rifle. From this equipment Michael deduces that the woman is a member of a militia group called The Fireflies, who had first revolted against the U.S. government’s oppressive quarantine measures in the early days of the pandemic, before taking over several western cities and becoming a sort of de facto government themselves.
This is confirmed by the woman when she finally awakens: she tells Michael her name is Gabriella Soto, and she was attached to a Firefly cell operating in what was formerly Mexico. Gabriella goes on to explain that she and her unit were attempting to return to the United States when they were ambushed by García and his Carroñeros near what used to be the US-Mexican border; all the other Fireflies were killed, and she is the lone survivor. She says that there used to be a Firefly safe house located in an historical plantation west of the city that she had hoped to rendezvous with; Michael recalls such a plantation, although regrettably informs her that the plantation was overrun by Infected several years earlier and burned to the ground. He doubts she will be able to reconnect with any Fireflies there, as they were all driven from the area a long time ago.
Over the course of their conversation Lucy begins to whine with increasing insistence, and Michael realizes that she can hear a group of Infected that is drawing closer outside; possibly the same group from the veterinarian’s office, that has followed them back to the cabin. He provides Gabriella with her old pack and weapons, and together they are able to hold off a sudden attack from both the usual Infected and a more advanced variant called Clickers—a much stronger variant that is completely blind and hunts via the use of sound (or clicks) to echolocate its prey. During the fighting Gabriella notices that Michael himself appears to possess an unusually heightened degree of hearing, so acute that he seems able to detect Clickers from rooms away—an ability far beyond her own.
Wrestling the last of the Infected to the ground and killing it, Michael and Lucy then take stock of their ruined home. As they are reviewing the damage Gabriella notices a bite mark on Michael’s neck, and realizes that during the fighting he must have been bitten by one of the Clickers. She suddenly draws her gun on him, claiming she will have to shoot before he has time to turn—she cites something she calls “The First Rule,” a well-known maxim among survivors designed to ensure that the infection does not spread, by stipulating that anyone who has been bitten must be killed promptly. Before she can pull the trigger, however, Michael urges her to wait, and reveals another bite that he received years before: he explains that he in fact is Mikey Jr, the same who was attacked during that initial outbreak in the Austin hospital many years earlier. Rather than becoming infected by his bite, Michael learned that he is somehow immune to the corruptive effects of the Cordyceps fungus, and since then has even enjoyed some of the advanced echolocation abilities associated with the Clickers. For the past forty years he has lived in his aunt’s cottage, with his father and mother; and then, after their deaths, by himself.
With this revelation Gabriella realizes that Firefly scientists might be able to utilize Michael’s condition in order to finally discover a cure for the Cordyceps virus—an initiative they have pursued for decades without success, despite a multitude of attempts. While Michael is initially reluctant to abandon his home, Gabriella eventually persuades him to accompany her up to Jackson, Wyoming, where to the best of her knowledge the Fireflies have maintained one of their last command bases for several years. Realizing they will need some kind of motorized vehicle if they are to make such a trip, Michael determines that they must travel into Austin itself—a daunting prospect, given its history as the pandemic’s source—to recover a car.
4. Together the three of them—Michael, Gabriella, and Lucy—make their way to the Austin city-center. It turns out that Austin was not just an isolated site, but rather Ground Zero for the entire outbreak in the United States, and at one point was a stronghold for FEDRA (the militarized government agency that had been working to contain the infection) until it was overrun and abandoned. Now the city is largely deserted, forsaken to the hordes of Infected that roam its streets; its skyline is perpetually covered in a green cloud of Cordyceps spores so toxic that any unimmune individual—like Gabriella—must wear a gas mask to resist them. Our protagonists carefully sneak through the city, eluding the many wandering bands of Infected and Clickers patrolling about, and eventually reach the old FEDRA headquarters, set up in one of the city’s police stations.
Breaking into the station and sneaking their way into the garage (and pilfering a pair of shotguns along the way) Michael and Gabriella identify an old FEDRA van as a viable option and begin to execute repairs. Some of the equipment they require is located down in the station basement, which has been flooded for many years; fortunately, Gabriella is an excellent swimmer, and manages to retrieve the necessary supplies. The two of them at last get the van running and begin to drive out of the city, where their vehicle is attacked by swarm-after-swarm of fast-running Infected called “Sprinters.” After a daring escape, they evade the Sprinters and start off for Wyoming.
5. The next day they approach the Texas-Oklahoma border, and Michael comments that they will need to obtain more fuel if their journey via van is to continue. They decide to pull over at the next exit and eventually locate an old gasoline station in a small town outside Amarillo. Before they are able to tank up, however, Michael and Gabriella are ambushed outside the station by a group of survivors armed mostly with bows and arrows, and together taken captive. While in their custody Michael soon realizes that the members of this particular group are comprised entirely of women; led by a gruff personage named Andrea, they call themselves “Amazons” and refuse to permit any men to reside among their ranks. Andrea comes close to ordering Michael’s execution, but Gabriella is able to dissuade her by revealing their present mission—Michael is immune to the infection, and the two of them are traveling to an old Firefly base in Wyoming to see if a cure can be synthesized from his antibodies.
Conceiving a unique opportunity provided by Michael’s condition, Andrea commands his execution stayed and offers a deal: the Amazons will provide him with gas and other supplies needed for his journey north, if he in turn will complete a task for them. There is an old department store in an abandoned strip mall not far from their hideout; it was formerly used by the locals to serve as a food kitchen during the outbreak, until the entire place was overrun by Infected. Of especial concern is the “Bloater”—a particularly large and dangerous Infected that is the final stage in the Cordyceps transformation—that has taken up residence within the building. Andrea instructs Michael to exterminate the Bloater so that the Amazons can recover any remaining food inside.
Escorted by several of Andrea’s Amazons, Michael proceeds to the department store and eventually finds a way into the building. Within he discovers the place has indeed been overrun by both Infected and Clickers, as well as more growths of spores that would be deadly to any unimmune individuals in Andrea’s group. Eventually locating the heart of the spore nest Michael stumbles across the Bloater and manages to kill it—retrieving from its body a sac of toxic spore-bombs as a reward, for potential use as a weapon of his own. With the Bloater dead the Amazons are now free to recover the caches of food and supplies; true to her word, Andrea frees Michael and Gabriella and provides them with the gasoline they need to continue on their journey towards Wyoming.
6. Several days afterward, Michael and Gabriella are approaching Denver, COLORADO. From the highway the city appears to have been as evacuated and abandoned as Austin, and there is no indication that anyone continues to occupy the area. However, on the car radio Gabriella picks up a signal transmission from the nearby University of Eastern Colorado, in which the broadcaster claims to be holed up in a location somewhere on the school’s campus—a safe haven from the hazards of Infected—and welcomes other survivors to join him. While Michael is against stopping and risking any further delay in their journey, Gabriella insists that they should pull over to investigate.
Reaching the University, Michael, Gabriella, and Lucy encounter a roadblock at the main entrance and are forced to proceed on foot in order to explore the rest of the campus. In their wanderings they encounter occasional Infected and even stray Clickers in several zoned-out sections, although the three of them are able to dispatch these obstacles without serious incident. Coming at last to the main Library they are greeted at the door by a man named Bernard, the grounds’ lone resident whom Gabriella recognizes as the same voice that she heard on the radio. Bernard welcomes them into his little utopia, where they discover not only ample food and supplies but also room-after-room filled with books—initially comprising the University’s original archives, but also expanded and supplemented throughout the years by many additional volumes that Bernard has been collecting.
Bernard explains that he has been living alone on the campus for almost two decades; his parents were once professors at the University in the days before the pandemic broke, and after their deaths he transplanted himself back to Eastern Colorado in their honor, where he now acts as a self-anointed “warden” and protector of the knowledge contained within his self-made Library. Gabriella in turn provides Bernard with a brief summary of her and Michael’s own history, ending with their present push into Wyoming in the search for the Firefly base and the hope of helping to secure a cure. Bernard says that he is aware of such a base, and explains that many years ago the University’s own lab facilities were utilized by the Fireflies in the pursuit of the cure Gabriella mentioned, before they transplanted to other areas—though he is unsure exactly how such experiments resulted or if they were ultimately successful. He had, however, heard rumors in recent years that the Fireflies had begun manufacturing special medicines that supposedly provided subjects with some resistance against infection, under the guidance and leadership of an unknown woman.
7. The perspective then shifts miles south and hours earlier, back to the highway route outside Denver. Now we are following the footsteps of García and his Carroñeros, who have been tracking Gabriella and Michael via motorcycles since Austin; in their train is a bound Andrea, bruised and apparently captured by the Scavengers from her base near the Oklahoma border. Like Michael and Gabriella García approaches Denver to find the city largely deserted, until one of his men likewise informs him of a transmission broadcasting from the UEC campus. Together the Carroñeros descend upon the school, fighting off additional Infected until they too come upon the main Library.
Here at last García executes his final confrontation against Michael and Gabriella. The latter board themselves up within the safety of the library, as Bernard rejects García’s overtures to cast them out; the Carroñeros in turn set fire to the library with Molotov cocktails in an attempt to drive them all from their safe haven. Eventually the doors are breached, and García fighting his way through the smoke encounters Michael and Gabriella with all the books burning around them. Despite Michael’s echolocation abilities, García’s men are able to overpower him and the others—eventually killing Bernard and disabling the other two.
It is at this point that García reveals to Michael the truth about Gabriella. It turns out that she is not a Firefly at all, but was once another member of the Carroñeros who one day happened upon the corpse and dog tag of the real Gabriella Soto and assumed her identity. For many years she had lived among García’s crew—not merely a gang of scavengers, it turns out, but rather a contingent of survivors comprising hundreds of men, women, and children that include García’s own wife and daughter—until their refuge in an old Mexican luxury resort was overrun by an incursion from a herd of Infected. It was Gabriella whom García assigned to protect his family while the rest of the Carroñeros fought off the attack, an assignment in which she was unsuccessful: in flashbacks we see that several Clickers broke into their hideout, slaughtering García’s wife and biting his daughter before Gabriella could kill them. Gabriella, in obedience to the First Rule, accordingly shot the young girl before she had time to turn, without first giving her father a chance to say goodbye. García and his group have subsequently been hunting the former Carroñera to return the favor.
Before García is able to deliver on his threat, however, he is suddenly attacked out of the fire by the shape of Lucy, who bites into his arm and wrestles him to the ground. In the altercation García manages to shoot her dead, but the ensuing confusion provides Michael with an opportunity to recover his shotgun: promptly killing García’s remaining men and disabling the man himself with a bullet to the leg. With Michael looming over him García makes a final plea for mercy, invoking the memory and injustice done upon him and his daughter by Gabriella. Looking to the body of Lucy—the last of his own family—Michael tells García he doesn’t care as he pulls the trigger.
8. Days later, Michael and Gabriella (continuing on without Lucy) have entered WYOMING and, according to passing road signs, are within just a handful of miles from Jackson and the Fireflies’ base. When their van finally runs out of gas the two of them are forced to get out and complete the final stretch on foot, through a tangled wood that has overgrown across the old highway. An unusually high number of Infected seem to wander through the area, and once more Michael and Gabriella are attacked—now with dire results. Fighting a Clicker off Gabriella, Michael discovers that this time she is the one who has been bitten, a gash across the arm that will turn in a matter of hours. Recalling the imperative of the First Rule, Michael prepares himself for this last act of mercy, but Gabriella instead begs him to hold off. She asserts that if they can reach the Jackson base soon, the Fireflies may be able to use the medicines Bernard referred to in order to help resist the infection. Reluctantly, Michael agrees.
They now continue on their way, with Gabriella growing increasingly weaker. It is not long before Michael must help support her, when they are ambushed once more by another horde of Infected. Still supporting Gabriella, Michael shoots off the attacking runners while dragging them both towards a compound they can see up ahead. With the aid of fire cover providing by sharpshooters on the compound walls, the Infected are fought off and the two of them at last stumble before the front gate, where it is confirmed they have reached the Firefly base. Michael, now near exhaustion, beseeches the guards to let them in, but spotting Gabriella’s bite mark the guards protest that they cannot permit anyone with an infection inside the facility. Michael argues and cajoles as long as he is able, until finally succumbing to his exhaustion and passing out.
The next we see Michael, he awakens alone in what appears to be some kind of dormitory bedroom. When he tries to get up the door opens and an older man enters, introducing himself as Dr. Chin. The doctor tells Michael that though he is now retired he was once part of the original Firefly team at the UEC that had been assigned to research a cure, and inquires how long Michael has been immune. When Michael blinks in confusion Dr. Chin explains that he noticed Michael did not carry a gas mask, and concluded that only someone who was immune to the virus would risk traveling without such; it was this observation that overrode the guards’ protests and allowed Michael and his companion to be brought inside the gates. When Michael asks where Gabriella has been taken, Dr. Chin assures him they have moved her to the medical wing for treatment, where she will be well-taken care of.
Dr. Chin provides Michael with some further background on Jackson and the Fireflies, including the base’s name—Libertalia—and additional information on his research. He says that while the Fireflies did find a few subjects who showed resistance to the virus (autopsies revealed that the Cordyceps grow primarily over the brain, so that those with latent neurological disorders—like the epilepsy Michael was treated for as a child—were particularly promising) none of them were ever sufficient to synthesize a complete solution. But under the oversight of a woman named “Eleanor,” who in recent years has become the de facto leader of the remaining Fireflies, they had come up with a few methods that were believed to help stave off infection. He concludes by welcoming Michael to Libertalia, and encourages him to rest up; it is his hope that with Michael’s help they may finally be able to discover a final cure.
Michael is informed that Eleanor would like to meet with him for dinner, and is given free reign of the compound. He begins exploring in earnest, chatting up several Fireflies and discovering among other things a series of letters written by a young woman signed “E”—they appear to be journal entries outlining her adolescence in the compound. Eventually Michael heads off towards the mess hall, when an alarm suddenly sounds: the facility is under attack by another horde of Clickers converging at the south wall. Michael joins the Firefly soldiers in fighting off the attack, and together they are ultimately successful; when the battle is ended, he is a little surprised to learn that Fireflies do not burn the Infected—as he had assumed, given their namesake—but rather collect the bodies for some unknown purpose.
9. That night, Dr. Chin escorts Michael to a large house in the center of the facility where the mysterious Eleanor has made her residence, lavishly decorated with art and tribal objects from cultures across the world. In the dining room Michael is greeted by Eleanor herself—a black woman several years older than he. She too welcomes him to Libertalia and repeats Dr. Chin’s overtures that she hopes with his aid they will finally be able to discover a real cure and start the end of the Cordyceps infection that has ravaged the world. Michael informs her that this is his hope as well, and inquires on the status of Gabriella and when he might see her. Dr. Chin says she is still being treated in the medical wing, but that Michael should be able to visit within a day or two.
While dinner is brought out Eleanor begins to tell Michael more about their current efforts to find ways of defeating the infection. She repeats Dr. Chin about the Fireflies’ early efforts at the UEC, as well as other medical facilities in Salt Lake City and Seattle, before attempting less conventional methods after those early efforts’ failures. She then begins to ramble, claiming there are those among the Fireflies who purport the Cordyceps may be a sort of divine punishment upon mankind for its wayward values, or even an attempt by nature itself to correct overpopulation. Michael tries to steer her back to the topic at hand, and mentions that both Dr. Chin and others state that the Fireflies have discovered some manner of improving resistance to the infection; he inquires how they have managed to do so without an actual cure. But Eleanor seemingly continues to babble, making references to spiritual healing and ancient remedies, before falling upon the subject of endocannibalism—the belief among several cultures that a person’s power and wisdom can be absorbed by consuming their flesh. As dinner is at last set upon the table, Michael looks down and realizes that the meal before him is actually Clicker meat, and that Eleanor and the Fireflies have been eating such in an attempt to gain—like him—the enhanced abilities of the Infected.
Visibly disgusted, Michael attempts to extricate himself from the dinner, but Eleanor implores that he keep an open mind and instructs two of her waiters (whom, it appears, are also Firefly soldiers) to restrain him. A scuffle breaks out, with Michael first fighting and then fleeing the soldiers that Eleanor sends chasing after him through the house. Evading Eleanor’s men and eventually reaching the outside, Michael concludes that his only hope now is to see if he can somehow locate Gabriella within the compound and escape Libertalia with her as soon as possible. He now makes his way through the dark—leveraging in part his preternatural hearing to continue eluding Firefly guards—to a fire tower he had spotted earlier in the day that looms over the center of the entire city, and climbing to its top activates the old county-wide alarm system. The noise is heard by every Clicker in the surrounding woods, which begin like an advancing army to converge upon the walls of Libertalia.
Returning to the ground Michael stumbles once more upon Dr. Chin, who has been searching for him. Dr. Chin explains that if Michael really wants to help find a cure, his best chance is to head for Seattle, where the last and remainder of the Fireflies medical staff set up their final operation years ago—though it has been some time since anyone at Libertalia received word of their progress. He warns Michael, however, that his own research at the UEC revealed that, as the Cordyceps infection manifests primarily over the brain, any operation to leverage Michael’s immunity would require a surgery that is most likely fatal. As a parting gift the doctor provides him with Gabriella’s location, restrained in a makeshift medical ward near the mess hall, as well as the site where they keep their vehicles.
By this point Eleanor’s soldiers have abandoned the hunt for Michael, focused instead on repulsing the hordes of Clickers that are besieging Libertalia. Michael sneaks his way through the battle to the medical ward, though the cacophony from the sounding alarms makes use of his echolocation abilities difficult. It is at this point that he comes upon the last entry in the diary of the mysterious “E,” who writes that she eventually left Jackson to also join the team in Seattle. Breaking into the ward Michael encounters a special group of Fireflies, with small pustules growing on their faces that seem to match the ones seen on Infected—Michael realizes that these must be those chosen by Eleanor to feed on Clickers. Like Michael they too appear to possess enhanced strength and hearing, but Michael has one final tool at his disposal: the spore grenades he recovered from the Bloater near Oklahoma, with which he dispatches the last of them.
The rest of the medical ward appears to be abandoned (a lone nurse attempts to hinder Michael’s progress, and is quickly killed) and Michael now comes to the heart of the facility. He discovers to his dismay that the “medical ward” is really a storehouse or storage locker for dead Clickers, with several hung up like swine in meat freezers. Pushing on Michael comes upon a large room filled with cages, and within each cage discovers someone caught in the midst of various stages of infection—not just Clickers, but including people freshly-bitten who moan and beg for his help. Michael eventually finds the cage containing Gabriella: by this late juncture she has succumbed completely to her bite, and transformed into yet another mindless Infected. He deliberates for a moment whether, as an act of kindness, to shoot her; before at last moving on to the garage Dr. Chin had referenced. Commandeering a vehicle, Michael drives off alone into the mountains as the compound of Libertalia continues desperately to fight off the Clicker attacks behind him.
10. In the game’s epilogue Michael arrives in Seattle, WASHINGTON, intending to sacrifice himself to the remaining Firefly doctors in order to help them finally manufacture the cure. Driving through the downtown he finds a city as equally dead and abandoned as Austin and Denver had been, overrun with FEDRA corpses and roaming Infected; he even encounters the carcass of a dead giraffe by the side of the road, in the process of being actively devoured by a horde of Clickers. Coming ultimately to the city hospital Michael enters and discovers that it too has been overrun; the littered bodies of Firefly soldiers are everywhere, and all signs indicate an unsuccessful last stand against an Infected onslaught. Locating a message recorder from one of the staff doctors Michael learns that the Fireflies here never stopped searching for a cure, but ran out of immunized subjects to examine and in the end were unable to hold out when the facility was breached; and that there is no one left remaining with the medical knowledge necessary to create such a cure, even if another subject were to be found.
Overcome by grief, Michael stumbles back outside and collapses upon the front of the hospital steps. Finally and utterly alone, with everyone he has known killed by either the pandemic or the cruelties of other men, Michael pulls out the same pistol that his father had recovered from that fallen police officer forty years ago, apparently contemplating suicide. Then—a sudden rustling from behind a nearby car causes him to look up, gun raised in the expectation of yet another Infected or Clicker shambling out. Instead we see the shape of a dog (the same type and breed as Lucy, in fact) scrawny and starved as it tries to crawl cautiously out. The dog spots Michael and begins wagging its tail, before the screen cuts to black.
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