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The first time she meets Joel, she tries to stab him.
It’s a good start.
Later, she realizes he was actually just trying to help Marlene up and she feels a bit bad. Still doesn’t trust him, though.
God, she should have insisted on staying with Marlene. What if she dies? Ellie doesn’t know exactly how she feels about Marlene. It’s weird that she says Ellie’s mom asked her to look out for Ellie, but she only showed up a few months ago and it was basically an accident they even met. She’s grateful to Marlene for the letter – and knife – from her mom, but she doesn’t feel like she knows the woman at all. They never really spent any time together before she got bit, and barely any after that.
But she’s the last person who knew Ellie’s mom. And that means something.
Joel mostly ignores her once they get moving, and she’s fine with that. Tess seems nice. She asks Ellie a bunch of questions, tells her about those clicker things, and she’s also kinda badass. She doesn’t seem scared of anything. Ellie likes her.
On the edge of the QZ, they get caught by soldiers. Joel gets smacked in the face by a gun, hard, and Ellie winces. She doesn’t like the guy much, but she also doesn’t like the idea of anyone getting hurt for her, and that looked like it really hurt.
Then the soldiers start scanning them and oh shit this is bad. They scan Tess, then Joel, and she feels the scanner against the base of her skull.
“Oh, man, oh, man,” she whispers. Shit, shit, shit. She grabs her switchblade and stabs the solider in the leg. “Sorry!”
He hits her in the face with his gun and fuck, she was right, that does really hurt. She’s knocked back and he points a gun at her and she’s pretty sure she’s about to be shot when Joel tackles the soldier. The gun goes off, but it misses and by the time she even realizes that she hasn’t been hit, Tess and Joel have killed both of the soldiers.
“Oh fuck!” She scrambles back from the body. “I thought we were just gonna… hold them up or something.”
It’s stupid and naïve and she’s almost glad when Tess grabs the scanner. At least if they’re distracted by the whole bitten-but-not-turning thing, she won’t look like such a fucking baby.
Tess thinks she’s full of shit, which she gets but she still needs them to take her to the Fireflies and also to not kill her, so she argues as hard as she can, wishing Marlene was still there.
“So was this lying?” Joel demands and tosses the scanner on the ground next to her. With how pissed they both look, she should probably be glad he didn’t throw it at her.
She’s not sure if they believe her at all, but they have to run when more soldiers show up and by the time they stop again, she’s at least pretty sure they’re not going to kill her, which is good. Tess asks more questions, and Joel’s an asshole about it, but they’re going to get her to the meet-up so, whatever. She likes Tess better anyway.
And then Tess is dead.
They leave her, and Ellie sees her body from upstairs for a split second before Joel forces her to move on.
He tells her to stay close when they’re moving through the hallway upstairs and he’s shooting at the soldiers. Not that she wasn’t already. She doesn’t know what else to do. She practically trips on her own feet like an idiot darting up to where he’s crouched, half-skidding to a halt between him and a crate.
He puts his hand on the top of the crate – she’s pretty sure she almost knocked him on his ass, good fucking job, Ellie – and she realizes how close he is.
She tenses. He doesn’t seem like a creep or anything, but does anyone at first?
His leg brushes against hers, and she doesn’t move, but she watches him out of the corner of her eye. He glances down – he’d been looking at the solders, she realizes belatedly – and shifts slightly away from her.
She lets out a breath. Probably not a total creep, then.
Ellie is still reeling from… fucking everything when they go down some stairs that lead below ground. The soldiers shooting at them call it a subway, but she thought that had to do with sandwiches? The military collapsed the entrances in the QZ and she’s only ever heard them referred to as “old T stops”.
Joel stops to put on a gas mask when they go into a room full of spores, which obviously isn’t a concern for her. She grabs him as he comes around the corner and yanks him down behind a crate.
“There’s a soldier over there,” she says, but he’s staring at her.
“How the hell are you breathin’ in this stuff?” he asks in a low whisper.
She’s weirdly hurt. “I wasn’t lying to you.”
He kills both the soldiers and she feels like she probably should feel guilty about that. It’s kind of her fault. If she hadn’t stabbed that first soldier, they wouldn’t be chasing them. But she’s seen what happens when someone scans positive. They would have killed her as soon as they saw the screen.
And the soldiers seem to think they’re Fireflies? And they seem to be willing to kill the Fireflies on sight, so she doesn’t really know what else they’re supposed to do. She can’t just die – if Marlene is right, this is too important. It wouldn’t make losing Riley worth it, nothing could, but she could at least feel like Riley was proud of her. She has to make it to the Fireflies. She has to make things better.
It’s not long before the place is flooded, and she has to remind Joel she can’t swim.
“We’ll figure somethin’ out.”
Easy for him to say. He’s not the one standing in the dark knowing one wrong step and she’s fucked. She finds a flashlight on an old body, though, and it still works. At least she can see now.
Then Joel swims over with a wooden pallet. “Get on.”
“Really?”
“Ellie.”
“Okay, okay.” She stares at it for a second. If she steps too close to the edge, it’ll definitely tip. She needs to be right in the middle. This seems like an awful idea. What if she’s too heavy and it immediately sinks?
But Joel seems to think it’ll work. And he does seem to know what he’s doing.
So she jumps. She almost overshoots, lands hard on one knee and has to grab onto the slats of the pallet to keep from diving headfirst straight into the murky water. She’s barely managed to catch her balance when Joel starts moving and it feels even less stable, tilting as he pulls and pushes.
“Be careful,” she says and she can hear how nervous she sounds.
“I gotcha.”
They make it across the water and she gratefully, somewhat shakily, climbs off the pallet.
She never wants to do that bullshit again.
They make it out of the subway and no one’s shooting at them for the first time in ages.
Tess is still dead.
So are the Fireflies, and she’s stuck with an asshole who immediately yells at her when she tries to say she’s sorry about Tess. You know, like a normal person.
This trip is going to suck.
They’ve been walking through Bill’s town for a while when Joel holds out a hand and stops her. “Shit. Look at this.”
She looks where he’s pointing and sees two wires strung across a doorway.
“Alright,” he says. “Stand back.”
He shoots them and they fucking explode.
“Oh, shit. Those things are kinda awesome.”
He doesn’t exactly laugh – she’s not convinced Joel knows how to laugh – but his voice is less annoyed than usual when he says, “That’s one way to do it.”
Neither of them are expecting to walk through a door and have Joel get yanked into the air by a fucking rope on the floor. It’s like something out of one of the ancient cartoons they used to watch at school when the adults wanted a day off. It’d be funny if it wasn’t for – well. Life.
She rushes to grab him to stop him from swinging wildly, which looks absolutely nauseating. What the actual fuck?
“Cut that rope and it’ll bring me down,” he orders.
“On it.”
She grabs the edge of the old fridge and hauls herself on top of it. The rope is thick – it’s holding a fridge, fucking of course it is – and there’s several loops around the fridge and her knife is sharp but it’s not made for cutting through rope like this. So, of course, that’s when the infected shows up.
She’s not looking, sawing as fast as she can, but she can hear Joel shooting them. At least on top of the fridge she’s high enough off the ground that they can’t reach her easily, giving him time to pick them off.
Finally she cuts through one loop and the fridge falls over, knocking her to the ground.
“You alright?” Joel yells like he’s not still hanging from his ankle from the roof.
“Yeah,” she groans, getting up. One more rope.
“C’mon. You can do it,” he says. It’s weirdly encouraging considering the situation.
The noise attracts more infected and she has to keep darting away from the fridge to avoid them now that she’s on the ground. She can’t get infected, but they don’t seem to know that and they seem to keep wanting to try. And she can definitely still die if one rips her throat out. Every time one gets close, though, Joel shoots it. He has her back, she can say that for sure.
Finally, the stupid rope gives and sends Joel crashing to the floor.
Bill saves their asses, but Bill also handcuffs her to a pipe, so Bill’s a fucking asshole.
“Joel?” she says as he drags her over to the pipe and she hates the way her voice sounds.
Bill kicks him in the back of the knee, knocking him down, and starts poking him. “Got any bites?”
Oh shit.
Ellie yanks at the pipe – it’s loose in the wall. Maybe if she pull hard enough…
“No,” Joel grunts.
“Anything sprouting?”
Oh shit, oh shit. If he sees her bite, he’s going to fucking kill her. And then probably Joel, too, for bringing her here.
The pipe jerks off the wall as Bill turns towards her and she swings it at him as hard as she can. Hard enough that he yells when it hits him and stumbles back.
Before her second swing connects, Joel is there, grabbing the pipe from her. “Are you done?” he demands but it’s aimed at Bill.
At least he’s on her side, even as he’s telling her to shut up. Her heart is still racing. He gets it, right? He has to get it. If Bill had seen her bite, she wouldn’t be walking out of this room.
The truck turns, startling Ellie from where she’d been leaning against the passenger side window and totally not falling asleep.
She glances at Joel but it’s too dark to see anything. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’. Rain’s just gettin’ heavy and it’s dark as hell. Can’t see three feet in front of the damn truck.” He sighs. “’Sides, I don’t know ‘bout you but I’m exhausted.”
His accent gets thicker when he’s tired. She wonders where he’s from. South, obviously, but she’s fucking terrible at placing accents. She mostly only hears them in movies sometimes, and none of her schools had that many. But she’s pretty sure if she asked, he’d just tell her off. Let’s keep our histories to ourselves, and all that shit.
Though he’s been nicer since they got the truck. He told her she was doing a good job before they started trying to get the truck going, and she’d overheard him saying to Bill that she’d held her own, which was cool and made her feel kind of proud of herself. But she’s not going to push it.
She squints out the windshield. “Where are we going?”
“Saw an ol’ sign for a farm,” Joel replies. “We’ll check it out, see how it looks.”
The house is mostly gone, just a few walls left standing. Joel goes through it to check for infected, then leans down to talk to her through the rolled down driver’s side window.
“Barn looks okay,” he says. “I’m gonna see what’s inside. Leave the engine on.”
It takes him just a couple minutes to declare it clear and she pulls the truck in. He closes the barn doors, then gets into the passenger seat.
“Just a clicker,” he says as she turns off the truck. The headlights go out, and the only light left is what’s coming from their flashlights.
The truck smells like Joel’s leather backpack and rain, fresh and clean. She wishes she could still like the rain. She used to love the sound. It just makes her nervous now.
“Alright, kid, move on back,” Joel says. “Roof’s leakin’, so we’re sleepin’ in the truck, and you are on my bed.”
“Oh, right.”
She crawls into the back, definitely clipping Joel with an elbow if his soft “oof” is anything to go by. Whoops. The backseat’s a bit cramped, but she fits okay if she curls up, which is how she usually sleeps anyways. Between the two of them, she’s pretty sure she’s going to be the more comfortable one.
Joel makes one of those old-people noises as he moves into the driver’s seat. “I’m gonna lean the seat back. Watch yourself.”
“Okay.”
She can hear him breathing and it’s a little weird. It was weird in the QZ when he crashed on the couch in that tunnel place, but she’d kept herself busy and mostly ignored him. Joel is fine, obviously, like she’s not afraid of him or anything, but she’s also only known him for like two days. It’s already weird getting used to a new roommate your age, let alone a whole ass adult dude.
She also hasn’t slept since Boston and she’s so tired that her whole body is starting to shake, but she’s still having trouble turning her mind off.
“What the hell did you do for three weeks?” Joel asks suddenly.
Ellie tries not to snort. We can just keep our histories to ourselves, huh?
Of course, it’s something she doesn’t actually want to talk about.
“Waited, mostly.” She sighs, curling up a little tighter on her side and pulling her arm in against her body. “Marlene thought I was full of shit at first. Thought I was… I don’t know, counting wrong or something. I spent like a week locked in a room until she realized I really wasn’t turning.”
And a miserable fucking experience that’d been. She’d thought she’d lose her mind. A few Fireflies had rotated a guard shift outside the door and she’d spent way too long begging one of them to bring her a book or a pack of cards or literally anything.
…she may have threatened to bite someone when they let her out to use the bathroom if they didn’t give her something to do.
“Hm,” Joel says.
“And then it was just more waiting while they tried to figure out how to get me out of Boston,” she says. “They didn’t tell me much.”
Marlene was always busy, and Ellie could tell she made the other Fireflies nervous, like they kept expecting her to turn at any second. Probably fair, all things considering. No one ever wanted to be alone in a room with her.
She yawns. It’s kind of nice talking to Joel. He’s not a total asshole all the time.
She can still hear him breathing, but it’s less weird now. She can feel her own breath matching the slow, steady pace of his. It’s almost soothing. Her last roommate in her old school had snored, and she’d gotten used to it. When she moved schools, she’d actually missed the sound, even struggled to sleep at first.
Plus as long as he’s there, she doesn’t have to worry about keeping half an ear open while she sleeps. He’s not going to let an infected attack her in her sleep or anything.
She’s probably safer than she’s ever been, she thinks with a bit of amusement. It’s the last thought she has before falling asleep.
She doesn’t get him. He was totally going to die if she hadn’t got there when she did, and she shot someone for him. And, okay, she thought for a minute she was going to puke after doing it, but she thinks that’s fair for her first time killing a person. It’s kind of a big deal.
She’s pretty sure you’re not supposed to find it easy. The hunters are deeply shitty people, but they are still people. It’s self-defence, but a human life still ended at her hands. That probably should mean something.
But she can handle it.
And she was always going to have to get used to it. She would have had to join the military when she was done school, and they would have made her kill people. At least this way she’s not killing Fireflies, or random civilians just for sneaking out of the QZ.
Ellie climbs out a hotel window onto some scaffolding and Joel waves her over.
“C’mere. Keep your head down.”
She crouches next to him. There is an absolute shit ton of hunters down there, and she can’t see any other way around. Fuck, that is not good.
“Alright now,” he says, voice low. “I'm gonna jump down there and I'm gonna clear us a path.”
“What about me?”
“You stay here.”
She wants to groan. “This is so stupid. We'd have more a fucking chance if you'd let me help–”
“I am!” he interrupts and she’s surprised into silence. He picks up the rifle next to him, holds it out to her. “Now you seem to know your way around a gun. You reckon you can handle that?
“Well, uh. I sorta shot a rifle before.” She takes it anyways. “But it was at rats.”
He look… concerned. “Rats?”
“With BBs.”
It’s not exactly impressive, she realizes. She used to trade dead rats to people in the QZ for batteries for her Walkman or film for Riley’s camera until she broke it. She still feels bad about that. Riley loved that thing.
Joel definitely doesn’t look impressed. She’s actually not sure she’s ever seen him make that face before. “Well, it’s the same basic concept. Lift it up. Alright now, you're gonna wanna lean right into that stock, 'cause that is gonna kick a hell of a lot more than any BB rifle.”
He puts his hand on her shoulder for a moment to show her what he means, and it completely covers it.
“Okay.”
He walks her through loading and reloading it – easier than BBs in a way – then says, “Now as soon as you fire, you're gonna want to get another round in there quick.” He catches her eye. “Listen to me – if I get into trouble down there, you make every shot count. Yeah?
He’s trusting her.
She keeps her back straight and the rifle steady. She won’t let him down. “I got this.”
“Alright.” Right before he goes to jump down, he looks back at her. “And just so we're clear about back there... It was either him or me.”
She can still feel the warmth of his hand on her shoulder. A few hours ago, she saw the same hand beat the face of the man who choked her until it wasn’t one anymore. It’s still reassuring, maybe more so somehow.
She’s starting to understand Joel-speak more, at least.
“You're welcome,” she says to no one, and aims.
Henry and Sam are the first normal people they’ve seen in this whole city, and Henry only tried to kill Joel a little. And in his defence, Joel was winning anyways. She doesn’t think he should get to be mad when they both thought the other was a hunter going to kill them.
“We can help each other,” she says right away.
“Ellie.” Joel moves between her and Henry and Sam, like they’re about to jump her or something. She wonders for a second if he even realizes he’s doing that.
“Safety in numbers and all that!” she protests. Henry and Sam seems like nice people, and she wants to help them. Joel is good at this, surviving, in a way most people aren’t, and they could help the guys. And it wouldn’t be bad to have someone watching their backs, either. If they’ve been here longer, they might know stuff about the hunters that could help.
“She's right,” Henry says. He shrugs. “We could help each other. We got a hideout not too far from here. Be safer if we chat there.”
Joel looks between her and Henry for a moment. “Alright, take us there.”
She likes Sam. She hasn’t had friends in… a while. Not since Riley left to join the Fireflies. After Riley left, everyone mostly ignored her. They’d liked Riley, not her. She didn’t much like them either, but… it’s nice meeting someone who does. And who’s her age. Winston liked her, but he was like an old guy, so he was more like how she imagines having a cool teacher or something used to be.
She kinda can’t tell if Joel likes her. Sometimes it seems like he does, like when she gave him the old tape or that one time he actually chuckled at one of her puns. But he’d been so pissed when she tried to explain why she’d gone looking for him after he fell down the elevator shaft.
It’s a job for him, she has to remind herself. But Sam is nice and they goof around and talk.
She forgets, for a bit, everything that’s going on.
Henry leaves her standing on a truck with absolutely no way to get Joel up to them. Up to her, since she’s the only one left.
“What the fuck, Henry?” she yells at his back.
She looks around frantically. Okay, she can’t pull Joel up alone, but there’s gotta be a crate or something that he can climb on. There’s always crates around – why are there no fucking crates here? How is this the one fucking time there aren’t a fucking million crates around?
Oh, fuck it.
She jumps back down.
Joel stares at her and she can see the surprise on his face.
“We stick together.”
She’s not leaving him to get killed by hunters.
They reach the bridge, and of course it’s fucking broken. Joel says something about bullets and she can’t even wrap her mind around it. There’s no way they can fight their way out of this.
“They're gonna kill us!” she protests.
“What other choice do we have?”
She points out at the water. “We jump.”
He shakes his head, pacing back and forth. “No, it's too high and you can't swim.”
She looks down at the water. It looks deep and it’s moving fast, and he’s right that it looks like a really far drop. She read once that falling from super high up into water is basically like falling onto concrete, but she doesn’t remember how high it is when that starts being true.
Joel gestures at the truck next to them, a big trailer blocking the way back. “I'll boost you up. You run past 'em.”
The hunter’s stupid tank thing hits the truck, and a car tips into the water. She can hear the hunters getting out, hear them yelling. It sounds like there’s a lot of them.
She’s not leaving him. And between the water and the hunters, she’d rather take her chances with the river.
She looks at him. “You'll keep me afloat,” she says and she realizes as she says it that she believes it with every fibre of her being. Joel won’t let her drown.
“Ellie…”
The hunters are getting out of the truck.
She’s not going to let him die.
“No time to argue.”
“Ellie!”
Without even looking back at him, she jumps off the bridge.
She doesn’t look, but she knows he follows. She sinks at first, into the quiet darkness of the deep water, and it’s almost peaceful for a second until she manages, somehow to fight her way to the surface. The water is fast and rough and she’s barely managing to tread water when she sees him surface.
“Joel!” she cries, choking on water as the waves crash over her head. She’s fucking sinking again, water rushing up her nose and she can barely get a breath without choking on more water.
Joel grabs her and pulls her up. “I got you.”
For a moment she feels like everything is going to be okay. Then she hears, “No – no, no no…”
She feels the impact of the rock through him as he wraps himself around her and takes the blunt of it. It still hurts and she can’t imagine how it felt for him. Worse, his arms go loose and the water covers her head again.
They’re going to die and it’s her fault. He was right – they should have tried running.
Something hooks onto her backpack and she tries to struggle away, until she realizes it’s pulling her to the surface.
Henry dumps her unceremoniously on the sand and jumps back into the water.
She tries to get up, but can only push herself onto her hands and knees as she pukes up an ugly amount of river water.
“Oh my God, Ellie,” Sam says. “Are you okay?”
She manages to sit up on her heels, wiping her mouth. “Where’s Joel?”
“There they are!”
Sam pulls her up and they both run over to help Henry haul Joel out of the water. It takes longer since Joel weighs like a million goddamn pounds. They drop him a few feet from the shore.
Oh, God, please don’t let him be dead, she thinks desperately. Please don’t let him be dead.
Henry leans over him, putting his ear right next to Joel’s mouth. “He’s still breathing.”
Ellie drops into a crouch next to him, knees weak. She’d like it better if he was breathing and awake, but she’ll take breathing.
“He’ll be okay.” Henry stands up. “You kids stay with him. I’m going to keep watch to make sure no one followed us.”
That’s fine with her. She’s going to stare at Joel’s stupid face until he wakes up.
It is basically the fucking longest five minutes of her life, watching him lie there and desperately hoping she didn’t get him killed, until finally, he groans and opens his eyes.
“Henry!” Sam calls. “He’s awake.”
Joel starts trying to sit up, so she grabs his hand to help pull him up.
But she pauses, just lets her hand sit on his arm for a moment. “Hey, you,” she says. “We’re alive.”
Henry’s laughing as he walks back. She’s a little annoyed by how casually he’s taking this when Joel’s not even on his feet yet, so she’s not exactly surprised when “a little annoyed” in Joel means he kinda tries to kill Henry again.
“He's pissed, but he's not going to do anything,” Henry says which is brave talk when he’s on the ground with a gun pointed in his face.
Joel steps closer. “You sure about that?”
“Stop!” Sam yells.
She puts her hand on Joel’s shoulder, partly trying to get him to fucking chill, and partly to reassure herself, again, that he is actually still alive. He’s solid and warm and very much alive, and it helps settle something that’s been screaming in the back of her head. “Joel.”
He still sounds absolutely murderous. “He left us to die out there.”
“No,” Henry says. “You had a good chance of making it, and you did. But coming back for you meant putting him at risk.” He points at Sam. “If it was the other way around, would you have come back for us? I saved you.”
Joel hesitates. He wouldn’t have, she realizes. Which, like, she probably would have argued him into going back for them – or she would have just gone herself, she’s pretty sure, and he would have followed if only to yell at her – but she can see the answer in his silence. He would have chosen her.
Only one other person has ever chosen her.
“He saved me, too,” she says and he finally looks at her. “We woulda drowned.”
He tosses the gun on the ground and steps away. She’s pretty shocked he doesn’t seem to want to immediately leave Henry and Sam. It’s probably a good thing when they split up for a minute to check the beach for supplies. She doesn’t think he’s going to try and kill Henry again, but probably better to give them a minute or two apart.
“That was intense.” She glances at Joel. “You cool?”
“Yeah. Let’s go find that radio tower.”
Okay, then.
Ellie sits on the ground while Joel digs the grave. She offered to help, but he said no. She smooths out the dirt next to her, and begins arranging a handful of pebbles into a spiral. Most of her just feels like crying, but she doesn’t want to cry in front of Joel. He’s probably never cried in his life, and she’d just feel embarrassed.
She lines up four pebbles on her knee. Riley, Tess, Sam, Henry. Four people dead because of the infected. Four people dead because of her.
“Ellie.”
She looks up at Joel.
“It’s done,” he says. “I’m gonna get cleaned up and we can go.”
“Okay.” She stands up, slipping the pebbles into her front pocket. They’re tiny, but she can feel the weight of them when she walks.
She wishes she knew how to say goodbye. She should probably be used to it by now.
She’s not.
Joel is staring at something. She walks over to where he’s looking and stares in vaguely the same direction, widening the gap between her feet and crossing her arms to mimic his pose. She can’t see anything, but she can tell it annoys him enough to be funny.
“What are we looking at?” she asks, drawing out the what.
He nods at an open window in the building they’re standing in front of. It’s small and high, but she could probably fit through it. “I think if we cut through there, it’d be faster than goin’ around.”
The whole street past this stretch of buildings is flooded, and it gets deep enough that the cars disappear. “Going around” would probably take them all day. Or more fucking pallets, if Joel decides to swim it. The gaps between the buildings are all filled with crap, too high to climb and not exactly safe to try.
“Okay, boost me up.”
“Mm, I think the door’s blocked off, not just locked,” he says. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”
“I’ll find you a way in.” She walks over underneath the window and waves her arms at it, stretching onto her tiptoes like she could grab it if she reached a little more. “C’mon, don’t you wanna know what’s in there?”
“Alright,” he says, sighing. “But you be careful.”
She grabs his shoulder and plants her foot in his cupped hands. “Yeah, yeah. Relax, I got this.”
It looks like an old office building. There are so many of those. Sometimes she wonders what people did in them all day and why they needed so many. She pokes around for a minute and finds an old pair of scissors, but not much else. Joel will appreciate those, at least.
Okay, time to find him a way in. Maybe there’s another door?
She checks a few doors, finds more offices. She thinks about checking the desks, but if she takes too long, Joel’s going to get nervous.
Oh, kitchen, that’s promising. The door has a big window in it that’s broken, and she opens it carefully to not knock the glass out.
Something screams behind her and the next thing she knows, a runner is basically on top of her. She throws her arms up to block it, but it shoves her back into the door so hard she hears it slam into the wall.
“Fucker!” she yells and pushes it away as hard as possible. She shoots it twice and it falls down, leaving her panting.
It’s not until she sees the blood on the doorframe next to the broken window that she realizes how much her shoulder hurts.
“Oh, goddamn it.”
Joel’s going to be pissed.
The kitchen does, in fact, have a fire escape leading out to the side of the building. She throws it open and almost screams at the sight of Joel looming right outside the doorway.
“Jesus!”
“What happened?” he demands as he steps through, pistol ready in his hand. “I heard gunshots.”
She scrunches up her nose. “Promise you won’t get mad.”
“Ellie!”
“Ugh,” she groans. “It was just a runner, but a fucking broken window got me. How bad is it?”
She turns around to let him see. After a second, she feels him brush her ponytail aside and examine the cut. It throbs and she bites down on her tongue as he gently prods at it.
“It’s pretty deep. Think you’ve got some glass in there, too, kid.”
“That sounds like it’s gonna hurt.”
“Probably,” he admits. “You think you can wait for a minute while I see what I can find to get it cleaned up?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
She can feel the sluggish crawl of blood down her back and it’s throbbing every time her heart beats, but she’s had worse.
They end up in an office on the second floor that has a couch in it. Joel spreads their first aid supplies on the desk, along with the things they’ve found. He glances at her, then rummages in his bag for a minute. He hands her a ball of fabric and awkwardly doesn’t make eye contact. What is with him?
He scratches his beard, then gestures vaguely at his own shoulder. “Uh, I’m gonna need to be able to see it so I thought… if you put it on and then turn it backwards…”
She unballs it and realizes it’s one of his spare shirts. “Oh, right. Thanks.”
“I’ll give you a minute,” he says and then practically bolts out of the room.
She’s not gonna lie, she is glad not to have to get shirtless in front of Joel. Over the last couple weeks, they’ve had to get a lot more comfortable with each other and the lack of personal space traveling across the country on foot brings. Like, she did not need to know how much he farted in his sleep after eating too many beans, and it was awkward enough when she had to keep stopping every hour to pee when she got her period. He didn’t say anything, but she did find extra supplies slipped into her bag the next time she looked.
But him seeing her in just her bra is a whole other story, and she will happily pass on that, thanks.
Getting her shirts off hurts like hell and she keeps up a running string of curses the whole time. Joel’s shirt is huge on her, though, so even buttoned, it’s easy to twist around.
“I’m decent,” she shouts and he opens the door again.
“Go on and sit down.”
She plops onto the couch, leaning her good shoulder against the back. “So how much is this gonna suck?”
“Probably a lot,” Joel admits. He looks at her, and sighs. “Okay, now we’re not gonna make a habit out of this, but I can’t exactly numb you up, so…”
He holds out a bottle of brown liquor.
“Don’t overdo it and make me regret it,” he warns. “One. Just to take the edge off.”
Hard alcohol has not gotten better in the last month and change. She manages not to spit it right back out this time, but barely and is still coughing when Joel takes the bottle back.
“Bleck,” she manages.
She thinks she hears Joel chuckle behind her, which is almost enough to make this whole thing worth it. She’s only heard him laugh… maybe twice? A short one at one of her jokes, and then talking to Henry about motorcycles? And that was only a low, wheezy thing, barely a laugh. No, he’d laughed a little when she gave him that tape. That was nice.
He doesn’t seem like he couldn’t laugh, but she thinks he might have forgotten how. She wonders if it’s just living in this world, or if something happened. Not that he’d tell her.
Joel sits behind her. “Is it okay if I unbutton this?”
“Yeah, sure.”
She appreciates that he asked. She’s not, like, jumpy about being touched like some kids at school. But Joel doesn’t know that, and she knows he’s trying to be careful with her.
He unbuttons the shirt just far enough to push it slightly off her shoulder. She can feel air on her back, and she has to kind of awkwardly move her bra strap out of the way, too, but it’s fine.
“This might sting a bit,” he warns before setting a wet cloth against the cut. She breathes through the pain, deliberate. Riley taught her a thing that’s supposed to help, five seconds inhaling, ten seconds exhaling. She’s pretty sure it’s bullshit, but she tries it anyways. “Just cleanin’ the blood off.”
When that’s done, she sees his flashlight come on, and he presses lightly on the edges of the cut with his fingertips. It throbs.
“Fuck,” she says without meaning it.
“Yeah, I know. You’ve got a couple good chunks in there. It’s gonna hurt to get them out but then it’ll be almost done, alright?”
She nods.
It is deeply fucking bizarre to feel something digging around inside your skin. It also makes her shoulder feel like it’s on fire, and she starts quietly cursing again.
“One more,” Joel says. “You’re doin’ good, Ellie. There, that’s all of it. Just some more water now.”
He rinses the cut out, catching the excess water with one of the old towels they found in the kitchen. It’s cool, almost soothing, though it still feels weird.
“Does it need stitches?” she asks and hates how her voice shakes, as much as she tries to hide it. She’s had to get them before, and they don’t always use anything to numb it at school. Especially not if it was your fault you got hurt. It fucking sucks.
“Mm, probably. But I ain’t got any, so we’ll make do. You’ll just have to be careful for a couple days.” He holds something around in front of her. “You seen these before? Butterfly stitches?”
She glances down at them. “Yeah, I did some first aid training at school.”
“Good to know. Gonna use a few to close it.”
It’s pretty quick after that. He puts the strips of bandage on, then covers everything in a layer of clean gauze, which kind of makes Ellie feel super guilty. They never have enough first aid supplies.
“There,” he says, sitting back. She feels him pulls the shirt back over her shoulder and slip a couple of the buttons closed, then he stands up. “You did good, kid. I’ll give you a minute to get cleaned up.”
“Thanks,” she says to the empty room.
“I don’t believe you.”
He glances at her. “Why would I lie about somethin’ like that? And put your hat on. You’re sunburnt enough.”
She pulls the baseball cap out of her bag and crams it on, tugging her ponytail through the back. He’s not wrong. The only good thing about having to always wear long sleeves in summer is it keeps the sun off her arms.
“I don’t know, but I don’t believe that people used to jump offa cliffs attached just by a string and then bounced around for a while till they were done. For fun.”
“Well, they did,” he says and he has that kind of warmth in his voice that means he’s amused. It’s not a laugh – she’s going to make him actually laugh one day, damn it – but it’s nice anyways.
“Did you?”
“No, but I jumped out of a plane once.”
She’s so surprised she almost trips over a crack in the pavement. “What? No, you’re shitting me.”
“Buddy of mine told me he’d give me two hundred bucks if I did it with him.”
“Did you get the money?”
“Before I got on the damn plane. Always get paid up front.”
She files that away in her mental box of “Weird advice Joel gives that might be useful one day but she can’t imagine how”. It joins such nuggets as “Don’t ever go to a secondary location with someone you don’t trust”, “Sometimes causing a distraction is the best way to win a fight,” and, “Lift with your knees”.
“What’d you buy with it?”
Something shuts down in his face. He doesn’t yell at her or anything, but the openness is gone. “Just groceries.”
She never understands when that happens. She’ll ask him stuff sometimes and he’ll actually answer – not about himself, exactly, but about the old world and what he did in it – but then it’s like she tripped one of Bill’s traps and he just goes quiet and closed off.
She lets it drop.
They end up at a lake later and Ellie is elated. Lakes mean they take a few hours off from travel to clean up and eat. It’s only noon so they’ll probably spend the rest of the day there, and not leave until morning. And she still has a pretty good chunk of soap in her backpack. She’s going to wash her hair and her clothes.
The thing she thinks she misses most is pajamas. Or, just like, casual clothes. Not wearing jeans. Mostly she misses not wearing jeans. She really misses wearing shorts and short sleeves.
But at least she is clean and in clean clothes. She starfishes on the grass under a tree and decides she’s not moving for a couple hours.
“Ellie!” Joel calls. “C’mere a minute.”
She sits up. Never mind. Whenever Joel says something like that, it’s probably going to be interesting. Either he’s going to ask her to climb onto something or he’s going to show her something cool.
He’s sitting near the water with a cloth spread in front of him. She drops down and sits across it from him. There’s a bunch of wire and string and beads on it. This looks like a something cool situation.
“You ever fish before?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Wanna learn?”
“Hell yeah.”
He shows her how to shape the wire and beads into lures. She’s surprised by how easy it is for him to twist the delicate shapes into being. His hands are so large, scarred and callused. She’s more used to seeing them on a weapon, or as a weapon. Whenever he boosts her up to something, they’re strong and steady and she trusts him not to drop her on her ass.
She wants to ask if he went fishing a lot before the world went to shit, but she wants him to keep teaching her more than she’s curious, so she keeps her questions to herself.
“Looks good,” Joel says when she’s finished a couple. “Here, tie it on. If you can find fishin’ line like this, it works the best but in a pinch you can use most any kind of string. Just gotta watch it don’t break when you try to pull it in.”
There’s a couple trees near the lake with branches hanging over the water and she climbs up and ties a line to one of the branches. He explains it usually takes longer, but they can leave it while they’re doing other things. Then he shows her how to cast another line into the water from a spot on the shore, one end of it tied to a thick stick, almost like a handle.
“Watch your hands. If you hook somethin’ big, it can cut you up pretty bad,” he warns. “Don’t wrap it around yourself.”
Fishing is kind of boring, she soon realizes. Lots and lots of waiting. Which is not exactly her strong suit.
“God, I could use a beer right now,” Joel says unexpectedly.
She’s so surprised she laughs. “Wait, really?”
“Well, I wasn’t offerin’ you one.”
“I’ve had beer.” Twice. It was gross, but she drank it anyways. Mostly to impress Riley.
“Don’t mean I’d give you one.”
“That’s so dumb,” she complains but she’s trying not to smile. Then something tugs on her line. “Oh shit. Joel!”
“Easy, you’ve got this.” He reaches around her and grabs the line, gives it a testing tug. “Seems hooked pretty good. Start pullin’ it in, slowly, and wrap up the slack.”
His arm is almost around her shoulders, to keep his hands from getting in her way, and he’s warm like the sun. It reminds her of when they were in the river and he was holding onto her. It makes her feel safe.
She wonders, sometimes, what a hug from him would feel like.
She starts reeling in the line, with Joel occasionally lending a hand when she struggles. Finally, she reaches the end and pulls up what she thinks is a pretty good sized fish. She holds it up, watching it wiggle. “Whoa.”
Joel steps back. “Not bad, kid. Not bad at all.”
She isn’t even embarrassed about how wide she grins.
Ellie’s socks have been wet since Nebraska. They squish in her shoes every time she takes a step, and she has definitely added a few new blisters to her collection. She thought the summer heat was bad, but the constant rain is worse.
And then it changes from a drizzle to a fucking downpour.
“Oh, fuck you, sky,” she mutters.
“Alright, we’re calling it a day,” Joel says a couple minutes later. “Look.”
They’ve been walking through some woods all day, mostly alongside a cliff wall where the trees are thinner. A few hundred feet ahead, she can see a hunk of rock kind of jutting out from the rest. It isn’t very big, but it looks dry.
Ellie would really, really like to be dry again.
The ground under the rock is a little damp, but Joel puts a blanket down.
“Go on, get under there,” he says. “I’m gonna see what I can find to make a fire.”
She looks at it. It’s starting to look almost cozy, especially compared to where she’s standing freezing her ass off. She wants nothing more than to hide out immediately, but she doesn’t want Joel to think she’s a baby who can’t handle some rain.
“I can help,” she says reluctantly.
“I know you can, but I want you to warm up a little.”
Well, he does say she should listen to him. She decides she’s done her part and crawls under the rock.
Joel hesitates a minute. “Ah, screw it. Here.”
The next thing she knows, he shrugs out of his jacket, crouches down, and sets it around her shoulders.
Then he’s walking away and she’s a bit stunned. His jacket isn’t completely dry, but it’s thicker than any of her layers and still warm from his body heat. Dude’s a fucking furnace. It’s the warmest she’s been in days.
A few minutes later, Joel drops a pile of dead wood just under the rock overhang. By the time he’s got a fire going, it’s almost dark.
“Ellie, take your shoes off,” he says as he crawls under the rock. His shirt is soaked and she feels a little guilty. He probably needed his jacket more than she did, with her hiding from the rain while he did all the actual work.
“You sure?” When they sleep outside, she usually leaves them on, in case they need to make a hasty exit.
“They’ve been squeakin’ since this mornin’,” he says. “Put some dry socks on if you’ve got any, too. Get your feet dried out before they rot.”
That’s not a thing. Is that a thing? Oh God, if that’s a thing she’s going to be so paranoid about foot rot now.
She takes her shoes off.
They eat as the fire warms the rock around them. Like usual, Joel gives her more of the food they have. She’s almost always a little hungry, unless they’ve just caught or shot something larger that won’t keep long, like that turkey she shot that they stuffed themselves on till they were almost sick. But he’s like twice her size and clearly needs it more than she does. She wonders if he thinks she doesn’t notice he does that.
She spreads her blanket over her legs after they eat. There’s not enough room to lie down, but she’s not complaining. She’s finally drying out so she’s not at risk for possible fucking foot rot, and she’s toasty warm between the blankets, the fire, and Joel sitting next to her. They don’t usually sit this close, but there’s no room to move apart. It’s kind of nice, honestly. He gives off so much body heat.
A yawn escapes her before she can stop it.
Is this what camping was like, back when sleeping outside was a thing people did for fun, not survival?
“Hey,” she says. “Did you ever go camping? Before.”
“Actually, yeah, all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I liked bein’ outside. And, you know.” She can feel him shrug. “It was different from normal life.”
She can picture it. It makes sense. Probably he was different before, but the Joel she knows doesn’t seem like someone who would only live in cities and spend all his time inside. She could picture him being, like, a lumberjack or something before she could see him spending all his time in one of those old office buildings.
The idea of Joel in a suit and tie going to work with a briefcase every day flashes into her mind, like something out of an old cartoon.
She chuckles. “So weird. Oh, hey. How much do s’mores weigh?”
He doesn’t reply, but she’s determined to make him laugh again, really laugh, and puns are as good a place as any to start.
“At least a couple grahams.”
“Do you even get that joke?” he asks, which, rude.
“Kinda,” she fibs, then deflates. “Okay, not really.”
He starts to explain, and normally she would be interested, but she’s so damn warm that she can feel herself nodding off. Sleeping outside usually makes her nervous, and the rain doesn’t help, but tonight she’s just hearing the soft tapping of it on the rock and the crackling of the fire, and it doesn’t bother her at all.
Joel won’t let anything happen to her.
Seeing his brother makes Joel look happier than she’s ever seen him. Which is still pretty grumpy-looking, but for him it’s a lot. He actually smiles. Joel smiles are so rare she could count them on one hand.
It really does look like Joel gives good hugs.
She feels weird. Joel and Tommy are obviously a bit uncomfortable because of whatever happened with them and how long they’ve been apart, but they instantly seem like family, and Maria by extension. Meanwhile Ellie’s just the weird extra one following them for reasons that she can’t explain.
She fiddles with the pebbles her pocket.
Tommy gets called away, and Joel decides to go with him.
“Go with Maria and put some food in you.”
She takes a step towards him. “Joel?”
It’s not that Maria doesn’t seem nice, but she’d rather not split up. She can’t explain why it makes her nervous.
“C’mon, Ellie,” Maria says. “Let’s give the boys some space.”
Joel gives her a look. Well… if he trusts Maria… Ellie trusts him.
Maria leads her to a room with a small kitchen, a bunch of couches, and an old pool table. They had one of those in one of Ellie’s schools, but some assholes broke all the stick things and lost a bunch of the balls so they couldn’t really play it anymore.
“Back in the old days, someone had to be at the plant at all times,” Maria says. “So some of the workers would basically just live here. Which for us means it’s a lot more comfortable to stay here than it could be.”
She laughs and Ellie can’t help but smile, too.
“Where are you two coming from?” she asks.
“Boston.”
“Boston? That’s a long trip.” Maria goes to the kitchen area where a big pot is bubbling gently over a low flame. “Do you like chili?”
“I like anything that’s food,” Ellie says wryly. Especially right now.
“A girl after my own heart,” Maria says, grabbing a couple bowls. “There’s some cornbread, too, in that pan there, if you wouldn’t mind cutting us a couple squares.”
Cornbread? She’s read about that in books, but she wasn’t actually sure it was a real thing. It kind of looks like the cake she had once, but really yellow. It smells really good, though. Much nicer than the bread they get at the QZ schools, which is either hard tack – and hard is right, she lost a baby tooth on a chunk when she was little – or stale enough to practically be hard tack anyways. Or moldy.
When the food is hot, they sit at one of the tables. It’s kind of nice to actually eat at a table. She didn’t think she would miss that.
“So is it just you and Joel?” Maria asks.
“Yeah,” she says, trying not to talk with her mouth full. Despite what Joel says, she does actually have some manners.
“Your mom’s not around anymore?” Maria asks, but she says it in that way that’s not really a question, or is only a question because being like “So your parents are dead, huh?” is kind of a dick move. Ellie’s well familiar with it.
She shakes her head. “Not for a long time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She does the orphaned-as-a-baby shrug. Again, a familiar dance. Most kids know it, or a version of it, even the few kids she knew in Boston who didn’t live in a military school.
“And how old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
Maria nods, then gives a bit of an embarrassed smile. “Sorry for the third degree, Ellie. I’m just trying to figure out why Tommy never mentioned you before now. He’s only ever talked about Sarah. I guess you wouldn’t have been born yet the last time he saw Joel.”
Why would Tommy know about – oh. Right. Just like with Henry.
Maria doesn’t mean anything by it, Ellie knows. It’s the most logical reason for them to be travelling together. And she likes Maria. She only spent a couple minutes with Tommy, but he seems nice, too. He made Joel smile and his voice go all soft. They’d be like her aunt and uncle, if she was.
And… Joel isn’t what she used to picture when she tried to think about what her father might be like, but she never knew anything about him anyways. She tries for a second anyways, but her old daydreams have been replaced with Joel teaching her to fish and hunt, showing her how to build a good fire, protecting her from infected and hunters, making sure she gets enough to eat, listening to her jokes.
Fuck, that’s embarrassing.
“Joel’s not my dad,” she says when she finds her voice. “A friend of mine asked him to look out for me. Wait, who’s Sarah?”
Joel had a kid?
How the fuck has she been travelling with him for three months and she never knew that? Did he say something and she missed it? No, she would have absolutely remembered that. There’s no way she would have missed Joel mentioning he had a whole ass kid.
Why didn’t he say anything?
She’s distracted, though, by the alarm and the running and the guys shooting at them, and by the time she actually sees him again, she’s just glad to see him again and to know he’s still all in one piece. There’s no way he didn’t help them deal with those guys.
She hops out of the broken window and runs up to him.
“Joel. Oh man... they were coming in from every direction.” She points, and Joel puts a hand on her shoulder, but she’s a little unsteady and kind of stumbles a bit. “Then Maria was like, “We gotta run!” And so we dove over these tables and this huge guy blasts in with his shotgun.”
“Slow down, slow down, slow down,” he says. “Listen—“
“And then—“
He grabs her shoulders, surprising her into stopping. “Hey, hey, are you hurt?”
She looks down at herself, a little breathless. “No.”
He was worried about her, she realizes, maybe as much as she’d been worried about him.
It makes it worse when she realizes he’s trying to get rid of her.
There are people everywhere at the power plant. She grew up constantly surrounded by people, but she’s gotten used to it being only her and Joel. And, worse, they’re all looking at her, curious. She’s scared she’s going to start crying in front of them all if she can’t be alone for a couple minutes.
So she does something stupid.
She knows it’s stupid, and she doesn’t need Joel, when he shows up in the ranch house, to tell her that. She’s been telling herself how stupid she is the entire time she waited for him to inevitably find her. It’s always just been a job for him. She was stupid to think they might be, she doesn’t even know, friends? Or that he might actually… well, she doesn’t need him to tell her she was being stupid.
He tells her anyways.
“What do you want from me?” he demands.
“Admit that you wanted to get rid of me the whole time!” she accuses because she doesn’t want to say what she actually wants. She’s fucking never going to admit that, especially not to him. It makes her feel like such a stupid, naive little kid.
He tries to feed her some bullshit about Tommy knowing the area better, and she calls him out on it right away. She knows him well enough to know when he’s full of it.
“What are you so afraid of?” she demands. If he’s going to abandon her, he at least owes her the truth. “That I'm gonna end up like Sam? I can't get infected. I can take care of myself.”
“How many close calls have we had?”
“Well, we seem to be doing alright so far.”
He shouts at her. “And now you'll be doing even better with Tommy!”
He’s never yelled at her before, not at first when she was pretty sure he hated her, not when he found out about her bite, not even when he told her not to talk about Tess, and it stuns her into silence long enough that he turns away.
“I’m not her, you know,” she says.
It’s… probably not the nicest thing she’s ever said. But it’s also the only thing that makes anything make sense. It makes everything about Joel makes more sense.
“What?” he snaps.
She makes herself speak calmly. “Maria told me about Sarah. And I—”
“Ellie.” He cuts her off and he kind of looks like she punched him. “You are treading on some mighty thin ice here.”
“I'm sorry about your daughter, Joel, but I have lost people too.”
“You have no idea what loss is.”
She would laugh if she wasn’t trying not to cry. How would he know? She doesn’t even know what her mother’s face looks like, and every day she wakes up a little more afraid she’ll forget Riley’s. Every day, she wakes up and she knows that Riley died to save her. If they’d known Ellie would be immune, Riley could have been more careful. If she’d insisted on leaving the mall sooner, Riley wouldn’t have been bitten.
Fuck, maybe if she hadn’t kissed her, they would have just left and Riley would be off saving the world with the Fireflies.
There are four pebbles in her left front jean pocket, and they feel like boulders.
“Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Everyone—“ She shoves him. “Fucking except for you!”
She’s crying, she realizes, like a fucking baby. It’s humiliating and she can’t seem to stop.
“So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else,” she says, and it hurts. She doesn’t want to be alone again. She’s never had anyone taking care of her. She’s never felt safe like she does with him. She can’t imagine just walking away and never seeing him again. How is he okay with that? Is she really that easy to leave? “Because the truth is I'd just be more scared.”
She just wants to stay with him, more than anything she’s ever wanted.
“You're right,” he says, and any trace of warmth is gone from his voice. She’s only heard him sound like that when he’s about to try to kill someone. “You're not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain't your dad. And we are going our separate ways.”
Tommy bursts in before she can say anything – and what would she even say – and the bandits outside are a relief, in a way. At least she has something to do.
The ride back to Jackson is silent. Awkward as hell. The town’s all lit up and she’d probably think it was cool if she didn’t still feel like shit. She slumps over the pommel. She’s pissed at Joel, but she’s even more pissed at herself. Angry, and embarrassed for letting herself get attached.
Embarrassed how obvious she apparently was. Probably why Maria thought she was Joel’s kid, too. How pathetically desperate she is was probably written all over her.
Joel and Tommy are talking – something about horns? – but she can’t focus enough to follow it. She wonders when they’ll leave. And how much Maria hates her now.
She wonders if Joel is even going to say goodbye to her.
“Ellie, get off your horse,” Joel says suddenly. “Give it on back to Tommy.”
Huh?
“I'm gonna hang on to this fella, if that's alright with you,” he says to Tommy while she’s still too stunned to move. He looks back at her. “Go on. Don't make me repeat myself.”
“What are you doin’?” Tommy asks.
Ellie climbs off the horse and gives its nose a gentle pat. It was a really nice horse.
“Your wife kinda scares me,” Joel says. “I don't want her comin’ after me.”
She walks it over to Tommy and passes the reins over to him. “Sorry for stealing your horse.”
He takes them, but he’s focused on Joel. “Look, come back to town, let's discuss it at least.”
Joel reaches down and grabs her hand to help her onto the horse behind him. She tucks her fingers under the edge of his backpack to hold on, and she can feel the warmth of his back through his worn shirt. “Eh, you know me. My mind's all made up. University Eastern Colorado. How do I find this lab?”
“It's in the science building,” Tommy says. “Looks like a giant mirror, you can't miss it.”
“You take care of that wife of yours,” Joel tells him.
Tommy looks like Joel when he’s sad.
“There's a place for you here, you know,” he offers.
He aims it at Joel. Ellie wonders if he means her, too. She spends a lot of time wondering what happens to her when they find the Fireflies. After they make the vaccine, does she become one of them? Does she go back to Boston? Marlene never said anything about afterwards.
Joel nods, glances back at her over his shoulder. “You good?”
It’s not exactly an apology. But she’s becoming an expert in Joel-speak these days.
“I'm good.”
It is easier to fall sleep on a horse than you’d expect. Especially when you’ve been walking or riding for almost three days straight. The infected have been assholes these last couple days. Every time they stop to let the horse rest, by the time they’ve found him water and food and done the bare minimum of feeding themselves, a horde of infected shows up and they have to sneak out of the area as quickly as possible.
She’s half-convinced it’s the same horde that’s just been following them through half of Wyoming. She swears she keeps seeing this one infected in this hideous neon green shirt. How many people died in neon green shirts? In fucking Wyoming?
She wants to just Molotov and nail bomb the fuck out of them. Joel wants to Molotov and nail bomb the fuck out of them, and he doesn’t usually like her ideas like that. But they’re really low on ammo and supplies for explody things, and he says they shouldn’t risk it.
Horses, though, have limits. Limits they are pushing, and their pace is as slow as possible to try not to overdo it. The problem, though, is how much nothing is in Wyoming. Which is normally good, but there’s also nothing between them and the infected.
Ellie has not gotten more than an hour’s sleep in three days. She’s so tired she’s not even sure her thoughts make sense anymore. The last time they’d stopped, she’d thrown herself facedown on the ground and flipped Joel off when he said something about looking around. An hour later, he was gently shaking her awake and she could hear the infected screaming in the distance. She hadn’t realized she had grass on her face until Callus tried to eat it.
The hard part about falling asleep on a horse, she thinks, is avoiding losing an eye on the arrows Joel has on his back. And the feathers keep tickling her face. But if she leans a little more to the left…
“Hey, hey, careful.” Joel grabs her arm and she realizes how dangerously close she was to tilting right off Callus’ back. Oops. “Ellie?”
She straightens. “M’fine.”
“Just a few more hours and we’ll hit a city. It wasn’t a quarantine zone, so we should be okay if we’re careful. We’ll lose ‘em there.”
She yawns. “I know.”
The second time she almost falls off Callus, Joel stops him. “Ellie.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she says, rubbing her hands over her face. “I swear I’m trying to stay awake.”
“I know, kiddo.” He hesitates a moment. “What if we switch spots?”
At least his arrows would stop poking her in the face.
“Alright.”
She leans back while he gets down.
“Scoot up,” he says, then climbs up behind her, settling into her usual spot behind the saddle.
It’s a little weird, since usually she’s either sitting behind him or alone – though, she thinks it’s weirder for Callus, since she is clearly in no shape to control the reins, and Joel has to adjust them when she passes them back.
He gives her shoulder a squeeze with his spare hand. “Good?”
“Good,” she repeats.
The next time she falls asleep, she wakes up when her head hits Joel’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” she says automatically.
“Ellie, if you can sleep like that, go for it,” he says, and he sounds a little amused. She’s too tired to figure that out. “I won’t let you fall off.”
“Oh,” she says. “Okay.”
She lets herself lean back against him. Horses are not good beds. Sorry, Callus, she thinks blearily. But when her eyes close, they don’t open again.
One of the assholes in the university grabs her right before she can follow Joel outside. She bites him, hard, and manages to get a good jab into his leg with her switchblade that has him stumbling back. She can tell he wasn’t expecting her to fight back so hard. He really isn’t expecting her to shoot him.
Then there’s a crash outside.
And Joel yells, and she goes cold. She’s never heard him make a sound like that.
She runs.
And when she sees him lying on the ground impaled on the rebar, she is more scared than she’s been since she saw the bite on Riley’s hand. Oh no oh fuck oh no. She climbs down a bundle of wires and rushes over to him. She can hear him groaning, cursing, and worse, she can hear banging on the doors behind her.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks.
“Move,” he says almost too low to hear.
Move? Move him?
She drops to her knees next to him. “What?”
He grabs her shoulder and shoves her aside. “Move!”
She hits her ass just as the doors burst open and two more of the hunter rush through. He manages, somehow, God, she doesn’t even know how, to shoot one and she takes the other out with a lucky shot directly to the throat.
She rolls up, crouching over him. There is so much blood spreading out underneath him, too much blood. She knows she should be doing something – putting pressure on it? – but she’s scared to touch it and hurt him.
“Oh man… Joel?”
He’s breathing fast. “I’m gonna need you to pull.”
You’re not supposed to take an object out of a stab wound. But he can’t – he can’t stay like this. They’re alone for the moment, but that won’t last long.
“Okay,” she manages.
He nods like he’s trying to reassure her, like she’s the one who needs it.
He yells again when she pulls him off the rebar, and it’s even worse than the first time. He’s bleeding so much that she can hear it dripping on the ground and when she grabs him to help him stand up, she feels it soaking into her sleeves, hot and thick.
“Just get to the damn horse,” he mutters.
She can do that. She can clear a path for him.
She keeps pushing him, yelling at him to move when he falls getting through the window, to move after she kills another hunter. He refuses to lean on her, insists he can walk, so she yells at him to fucking walk. She really hopes he knows she’s not actually mad at him, but she needs him to keep moving – she needs him so damn much – and the only thing she can do is try to do is get them out of here.
He stumbles, grabbing one of the old tables. He looks so pale.
“Joel!”
“Behind you.”
“What?”
Shit, three more of them are coming down the stairs.
She sees him fall, hears him say her name and she wants nothing more than to go to him but the hunters are moving fast. She shoots till she runs out of bullets, and her aim is awful from how bad her hands are shaking. There’s still one coming at her as she frantically reloads.
He smacks her, hard, with a pipe and she hits the ground. Her ears are still ringing when she shoots him three times in the chest.
Joel hasn’t moved. She’s not sure he can on his own. She isn’t even sure how he’s still awake.
“Joel? Here, stand up.” She manages to pull him to his feet. “Here. Put your arm around me.”
It’s definitely a sign of how bad he’s doing that he leans on her this time. He’s heavy, and he’s not nearly as warm as he usually is.
One of the hunters seriously tries to steal Callus and she’s actually fucking pissed about that. Like, really, trying to kill them isn’t bad enough, they try to take their horse? She doesn’t even feel bad about shooting him.
She’s pretty sure Joel only gets on the horse by sheer stubbornness. She keeps watching behind them until they make it far enough away that it seems like they’ve lost the hunters.
And then he falls off the horse.
“Ah, shit.” She jumps off Callus, kneeling beside his head. “Joel – here.” She grabs his shoulder and tries to lift him, but he’s so fucking heavy and he’s not responding. “Get up, get up, get up. You gotta tell me what to do. Come on... you gotta get up. Joel?”
She’s crying, she realizes. He’s not moving and she can’t stop crying.
She puts her hand on his chest and holds her breath until she feels it moving, until she feels his heart beating.
“Okay.” She takes a shuddering breath. Okay, she can do this. He’s alive, still, somehow. She’s going to try to keep him that way.
She tries to think it through the best she can through the panic in her brain. It’s snowing heavily, the temperature rapidly dropping, and they can’t stay in the street. They got far enough to be safe for the moment, but that won’t last. They’re severely lacking in medical supplies, especially for a wound like this. She needs supplies and she needs a way to move him.
What would Joel do?
Look around for anything we can use. She can almost hear his voice in her head. She’s heard him say it enough.
Okay, they’re in like an old residential neighbourhood. It looks like mostly houses, like the kind families probably used to live in. The kind Joel used to make. She can’t search the houses – can’t go further away than how far she can see him from. He’s too vulnerable. Garages then.
“I won’t go far,” she promises and goes to the nearest one.
She uses the pipe Joel’s been carrying around to break the window on the door, unlocks it, and then opens the big door from inside so she can see him while she searches. It’s full of junk, old tools and boxes of crap. She finds some rope and moves onto the next.
Nothing. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The third garage she opens is full of old kid toys. Balls, bicycles – and a large blue plastic sled.
“Oh,” she says, and hears her voice shake. They had a few of these in Boston, would sneak out of school to take them and trash can lids and cardboard boxes to slide down hills when it snowed.
She can work with this.
She grabs it and runs back to Joel, who hasn’t moved. Callus makes a nervous noise and she drops the sled and grabs her gun as she looks around.
Nothing. He must just be picking up on her anxiety.
“Don’t do that,” she tells him and goes to Joel.
Now, how is she supposed to get him on the sled? She can’t lift him, and she doesn’t think she can just slide it under him like a spatula.
She kneels next to him, snow already soaking into the knees of her jeans, and tries to think. His backpack’s going to get in the way.
“Okay, let’s get this off,” she says. She loosens the straps and eases his arms out. It’s still under him, though. “I’m gonna – I’m gonna have to move you a bit.”
He doesn’t say anything. She wishes he would say something.
She puts her hands under his back and pushes until she manages to turn him onto his side. He groans and she apologizes, over and over. When she pulls his backpack free, she tries not to notice how soaked in blood his jacket is.
Okay, she managed to move him a bit. Not much, but a few inches. And it gives her an idea.
She pulls the blanket out from his bag and lays it across the sled. She slides everything over, right up against him. When she pushes him back down onto his back – “Sorry, sorry,” – he’s about halfway on it. Then she moves down, grabs the blanket in both hands, plants her feet against the edge of the sled, and pulls as hard as she can while pushing even harder with her feet.
He slides onto it. Grunts with the impact, and she hates that she’s hurting him, but it works. She can tie it to Callus and he can pull it, and they can get the fuck out of here.
“Oh man, okay.” She tucks his arms over his chest and makes sure his feet are on the sled. “What now?”
What do we have and what do we need? she hears in her head.
She grabs his backpack and rifles through it for a minute, trying not to feel like she’s invading his privacy. Normally she never touches his stuff. There’s a decent stock of ammo, at least. Some food, some water. Not enough of either to last long. A handful of small tools. A map. Oh, thank you, Joel, she thinks. She’s so glad he’s always grabbing maps.
She spreads it on her legs. Her fingers leave bloody smudges on it as she figures out where they are. There’s the University, which is an automatic no. They’re not going back there. There’s a hospital, but it’s way too far away and Joel says people raided them first so there’s never anything left but infected. A school maybe? Schools used to have nurses, right?
Then she sees it. Colorado Mountain Plaza.
A mall.
Fuck.
But it’s close.
The mall in Boston was full of stuff. Stuff, and infected.
He would do it. He’d do it for her. She doesn’t feel like she can trust herself right now, but she can trust him.
Mall it is.
She leaves Joel hidden in the garage with Callus while she slowly and methodically clears the neighbourhood of infected. If one of them gets into the house, Joel can’t defend himself. What do we need, she hears, and they need safe shelter from the storm. Callus is going to need food sooner than later, and water, and she’s not going to be able to stay with Joel all the time when she’s looking for supplies.
By the time she gets back to them, it’s already dark and she’s covered in as much infected blood as Joel’s.
She puts Callus in the kitchen for the night, taking off his saddle and tossing it onto the counter. He’s a good horse, he won’t wander. She’s just nervous about him accidentally stepping on Joel in his sleep or something. And if anyone or anything comes through another way, she’ll hear him first. He’ll help keep them safe.
Most of the stuff in the kitchen is broken or gone, but she finds a bowl and pours most of their water into it for him. They all need more, but this is the best she can do for now. It’s getting too dangerous to be outside.
She sits on the cold garage floor next to Joel. “I don’t think I can do anything else,” she says to him. It’s storming too hard. She can’t drag Callus out in that, and there’s only so much she can do alone. And she’s so tired. She’s tired and she’s scared and her head is starting to throb for some reason. Dehydration, probably, but she doesn’t drink anything. She finds the cleanest cloth she can – a piece of one of her shirts, almost everything else is bloody at this point – and soaks it in water.
He lost so much blood. He needs it more than she does, but he’s still unconscious. If she tries to pour it down his throat, he might choke. She remembers that much from her first aid classes at school. So she holds the wet cloth above his mouth and squeezes until water trickles out, dripping slower than she could pour it.
It gets some water into him, though a lot runs down his chin. It’s something.
What would Joel do, she asks herself again. They have shelter. They have a bit of water. They don’t have a lot of food. But it’s snowing, and there’s plenty to burn in the neighbourhood. She can find food, and she can melt snow for water.
He’d probably tell her to sleep now, while she can.
She lies down on the cold garage floor next to him. “Okay,” she says. “You can wake up now.”
He doesn’t, and she cries herself to sleep.
There’s still a part of her that feels bad about killing the deer. More than killing people these days, and that’s probably fucked up. But a deer has never tried to shoot her first.
It is what it is, though, and it’s going to be a lot of food. She’s been living mostly on rabbits and squirrels, both of which have shockingly little meat on them. The first day she went to a nearby farm to get hay for Callus, using the sled to haul it back, she’d found some old cartons of chicken broth. She’d sat with Joel’s head in her lap to lift him up, and poured tiny spoonful after spoonful of it down his throat.
When it ran out, she’d started making rabbit or squirrel broth instead. The squirrels worked better for it – they were fattier. As long as she found enough salt and shot enough squirrels, she could keep him alive. She’d even found some old instant mashed potatoes at one point, and she’s given him some of those, mixed with a lot of broth into a thin slurry.
Nothing is ever enough, and he’s lost weight, but he’s alive. They’re alive.
Something cracks behind her and she spins around with her bow up.
“Who's there? Come out!”
She’s not sure if she would rather it be hunters or infected. Infected don’t sneak though, so she’s not surprised when two men walk out from behind the building.
“Hello,” the one says. His face is thin, almost pinched, but he’s looks like he’s trying to look friendly. “We just want to talk.”
He ain’t even hurt.
“Any sudden moves and I put one right between your eyes.” She aims the arrow at the other guy. He looks younger, maybe thirty. The thin-faced guy looks closer to Joel’s age. They don’t look related. Friends, partners, or hunters working together? “Ditto for buddy-boy over there. What do you want?
“Name's David, this here's my friend, James. We're from a larger group – women, children – we're all very, very hungry.”
“So am I – women and children – all very hungry too.”
It’s sort of true. She is both women and children, and she is very hungry. Technically she’s from a larger group, even if that larger group is a group of two. Two is larger than one. It’s easier to bluff if there’s some truth in it.
“Well, maybe we could, ah, trade you for some of that meat there. What do you need? Weapons, ammo, clothes–”
“Medicine!” she blurts. Joel has had a fever for days. Infection, clearly. The bacteria kind, not the bitten kind. She’s given him all the painkillers she’s found to try and lower it, but she knows it doesn’t address the root cause. She makes herself speak more calmly. “Do you have any antibiotics?”
“We do. Back at the camp.” David takes a step forward. “You're welcome to follow us–”
“I'm not following you anywhere,” she snaps and he stops moving.
Don’t ever go to a secondary location with someone you don’t trust.
“Buddy-boy can go get it. He comes back with what I need, the deer is all yours.” Always get paid up front. “Anyone else shows up–”
“You put one right between my eyes,” David guesses
Now he’s getting it. “That's right.”
David turns to buddy-boy. “Two bottles of the penicillin and a syringe. Make it fast.”
She wants to be able to trust him. She hasn’t spoken to another person in weeks, and she would really like to let someone else be in charge for a while. She wishes Sam and Henry were still here. Henry would have been able to help. Sam would have made her feel better. It’s nice to have someone else fighting against the infected, telling her to run, making decisions, and she would like to trust David.
But she doesn’t.
She keeps comparing him to Henry. Henry tried to get them to trust him, to work together. Henry joked, laughed sometimes even when he shouldn’t. Henry boosted her up a few times, pulled her out of a river, shoved her back out of the way of a clicker once, then apologized and offered her a hand up off the ground.
Henry didn’t grab her to pull her places. Henry didn’t smack her in the shoulder like they were buddies. Henry didn’t make her stomach uneasy when he touched her. Henry didn’t betray her and Joel.
David isn’t like Henry.
She picks up the penicillin and keeps the gun on the both of them as she walks towards the door.
“You won't survive long out there,” David says. “I can protect you.”
She scoffs. “No thanks.”
Fuck, her head hurts. She groans softly, her hands going to her forehead. There’s a thudding somewhere nearby and her head throbs in time with it. What – oh, no. This is not the basement.
Don’t ever go to a secondary location with someone you don’t trust.
Sorry, Joel. Too late.
She’s in some kind of cell or cage. The room outside her looks like a kitchen maybe? Why would a kitchen have a cage in it?
She sits up, moves towards the gate. James is standing at a table nearby, chopping something. Meat?
Oh... oh, fuck, that’s an arm.
She makes an involuntary noise and falls back, needing to put space between her and… this. She can’t stop staring at the pile of body parts on the floor. James scoffs at her, throws the bloody cleaver – human blood, they’re eating human bodies, her brain helpfully adds – on the table, and walks off.
She yanks at the gate, tries to pull the lock off. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Weak spots, everything has a weak spot. There has to be a way out.
A moment later, David walks in. He’s got a tray of something in his hands. She can smell food. Her stomach revolts and contracts at the same time.
“How are you feeling?”
She sees he’s back to the fake nice thing. She stops trying to open the gate.
“Super.”
“Here.” He slides the tray under the gate. It bumps into her shoes. She steps back. “You should eat. I know you're hungry – been out for quite some time.”
Yeah, and whose fault is that?
She needs to stay calm. Needs to be smart. Fuck, they’re eating people. “What is it?”
“It's deer.”
“With some human helping on the side?” she asks, glancing at the torso on the table. She wonders, sickly, what happened to the person’s head. This is worse than the hunters in Pittsburgh. This is the worst thing she’s ever seen.
“No. No, I promise,” David says, like she should believe anything he says. “It's... just the deer meat.”
She wants to throw it in his face. But she also hasn’t eaten in… she doesn’t even know. It isn’t dark so it’s probably still the same day, but the light is already turning golden. She caught that rabbit yesterday, but it’s buried in a snowbank outside the house. She’d been too tired to butcher it and had just passed out next to Joel. She’d woken up to give him a second shot in the middle of the night, and to check his fever, but she hadn’t wanted to leave him then.
Before that… maybe two days? She’d had a bag of very stale chips at some point, but she doesn’t remember when.
“You're a fucking animal,” she says, and kneels down to eat.
David crouches on the other side of the gate. He watches her eat, and she can tell he’s pleased she gave in. It makes her sick, but she can’t stop. “Oh, that’s awfully quick to judgment. Considering you and your friend killed how many men?”
“They didn’t give us a choice,” she says with her mouth full. Something else bothers her about that, though.
“Friend” is a weird word here, she thinks. Bill had said “baby-sitting” which was sorta accurate, if insulting. Henry had assumed she was Joel’s daughter, as had Maria. Daughter makes sense for why a man Joel’s age is travelling with a girl her age. Uncle would, too. Hell, cousin, even. Friends is probably not wrong when it comes to what they are – she doesn’t really know what they are – but it’s… weird that his mind goes there before relative.
“And you think we have a choice?” David says, laughing a bit. “Is that it?”
She downs the cup of water, stares at him. Yeah. This is a fucking choice.
“You kill to survive... and so do we. We have to take care of our own. By any means necessary.”
Must be nice to be able to turn off your humanity like that. They weren’t even close to a threat in the university. His people shot at them on sight. They might as well have been the deer, nothing but a source of food.
“So now what?” she asks. “You gonna chop me up into tiny pieces?”
David chuckles. “I'd rather not,” he says in that fake nice voice. “Please tell me your name.”
She slams the tray back under the gate at him, sending the empty cup and plate flying off.
“You're so full of shit,” she says, standing. She grabs onto the bars just to give her hands something to do, so it’s not so obvious they’re shaking.
“On the contrary.” He picks the dishes up and puts them back on the tray, setting it to the side as he stands. “I've been, ah, quite honest with you. Now I think it's your turn. It's the only way I'm gonna be able to convince the others.”
What the fuck is he on about?
“Convince them of what?”
“That you can come around. You have heart.” He moves closer. “You're loyal. And you're special.”
He puts his hand over hers, and she knows.
Special is not good.
“Oh...”
She covers his hand with her other one. His hand is cold, skin dry and papery, and she can feel the bone through it. The bone that cracks loudly when she rips his finger back as hard as she can.
She keeps a hold on it as tight as she can and tries to grab at the keys on his belt. She has them in her hand when he grabs her arm and slams her again and again into the cell door. It hits her hard in the face and she drops the keys when she falls.
“Oh, fuck.”
Her nose is bleeding.
“You stupid little girl,” David snarls at her, and oh, look, the fake nice mask is gone. Colour her shocked. “You are making it very difficult to keep you alive. What am I supposed to tell the others now?”
He still wants to convince them, she thinks, sick with the realization. He still wants to… oh, God.
She wipes blood from her nose with her sleeve. “Ellie.”
“What?”
“Tell them that... Ellie is the little girl… that broke your fucking finger!”
“How did you put it?” he asks darkly. “Hmm? Tiny pieces? See you in the morning, Ellie.”
He leaves and she curls into a ball. She’s not going to let any of these assholes see her cry, but she can’t stop shaking. She wants so badly to be anywhere but here. Joel’s probably going to starve to death in a cold basement alone. She touches the pebbles in her pocket. She doesn’t have one for him. She doesn’t want one for him.
Selfishly, she almost hopes they just kill her in the morning. She thinks it would be worse if David put his hands on her again.
She really misses Joel.
She kicks the fencing of the cell until her feet hurt, claws at the window until her nails are broken and bloody and even tries to see if there are any loose bricks in the wall that she could smash it with. She tries hitting it, but the glass is too thick and all she does is hurt her elbow.
Eventually she wears herself out and passes out on the floor.
She doesn’t even hear the cage unlock. She’s woken by James grabbing her and pulling her off the floor.
“Wakey, wakey. Come on.”
“Let go!”
She tries to elbow him, kick him, anything but he keeps pushing her forward and she can’t land a good hit. David grabs her shoulder and without hesitating she bites his hand as hard as she can. He knees her in the stomach and she’s too winded to do anything but groan when they slam her onto the table. It hurts, everything fucking hurts.
David grabs the meat cleaver and raises it over his head. “I warned you.”
Sometimes causing a distraction is the best way to win a fight.
“I’m infected!” she blurts, breathless. “I’m infected!”
He looks from her to James and back. He doesn’t believe her, obviously. Looks almost amused. “Really?”
“And so are you. Right there.” She pulls on her right arm, and he presses it harder into the table. “Roll up my sleeve. Look at it!”
“I'll play along.”
He slams the cleaver into the table next to her head, and she flinches away. She can’t watch him push her sleeve up without it making her stomach turn, but she’s rewarded by how shocked he looks.
“What'd you say?” she asks. “Everything happens for a reason, right?”
James cracks and lets go of her left arm. She holds her breath. She has to time this just right. “What the hell is that?”
“She would've turned by now,” David says. “It can't be real.”
“Looks pretty fucking real to me!” James counters, which, like, no shit. What the fuck would it be if it’s not real? Does he think she did it to herself?
David turns away to look at the hand she bit, leaving only the hand with the broken finger on her wrist. Weak spot.
She grabs the cleaver and swings it as hard as she can into James’ neck, rolling off the table right as David shoots at her. She sees James hit the floor, choking on his own blood – good – before she bolts, pushing past the hanging, skinned body of what she hopes is the deer she shot.
The room she ducks into is small and cold, probably an old storage room. There’s no door out, but there’s a big broken window. Outside, there’s a storm kicking up, wind howling and snow coming down hard. She has no weapons, no supplies, and no idea where she is.
And then she sees her knife.
It’s stabbed into an empty shelf right next to her. She grabs it. “Okay.”
She’s getting out of this fucked up place.
She jumps out the window into the storm.
Back at the university, she killed seven of them. The one she shot when Joel was impaled, the three on the stairs, the one who was trying to steal Callus – oh, God, they probably wanted to eat him – plus the one that grabbed her and another who tried to sneak up behind Joel when they were first trying to leave.
When the third body drops in the pet store, she wonders if she’ll end up with double digits on her hands today.
She tries to sneak through the town, but they know it better than she does. Everywhere she goes, there’s more of them. She just wants to leave, but even if she manages to escape, will she just lead them back to Joel? They already tracked her once. If she leads them to Joel, she can't get him away, not without Callus.
Her hands are so cold she can barely hold her knife, but they get warmer when she spills blood onto them, over and over.
She wants this to be over. She wants to go back to Joel where it’s safe. She wants not to be alone.
She loses count of how many people she kills. It makes her sick, but she can’t stop. They keep finding her and they will kill her if she doesn’t act first. They try, and she gets hit hard, more than once, barely escapes getting shot multiple times.
“This place is a maze,” she mutters. She thinks she’s been talking to herself a lot. More than usual, which is saying something, but things are getting… fuzzy. It is freezing, colder than it’s been all winter, and she’s not in warm enough clothes to be out in it. The cold is starting to be as much of a threat as the fucking cannibals.
When she sees the open window, she doesn’t think, just jumps through. It’s warm and she immediately feels sharper.
Why is it warm in here?
It’s an old restaurant. They must have meals in here, she thinks, and sure enough when she turns a corner, there’s a big ass banner that says, “When we are in need He shall provide!”
Fuck all of this.
She keeps low until she’s sure no one will see her through the windows, then spots the door and makes a run for it. She opens it only for David to grab her and yank the gun out of her hands.
“You’re easy to track.”
She bolts, hiding behind anything she can. He locks the door, and she knows that the window she came in through is too high to climb back out. She is very thoroughly trapped as the flames next to the door burn higher and higher.
Her only saving grace is his shooting is terrible – because the finger she broke is on his shooting hand, she realizes, and is all the more glad she did. It might have just saved her - if she gets out of this alive.
“You give up now and I promise to be quick,” he taunts. “Promise.”
Considering he’s stalking her with a fucking machete, she finds that hard to believe.
She sneaks up behind him and stabs him in the back. Aims for the kidneys, but misses and has to duck away when he swings wildly.
“Run little rabbit, run,” he laughs.
He’s bleeding a lot, but not enough. She knows how much a person can bleed before they stop, especially if they have enough adrenaline.
Why won’t he just fucking die?
She sneaks up behind him again and stabs him in the shoulder. Neck, throat, she needs to get him somewhere like that.
Before she can, he slams her backwards onto a table, then grabs her and throws her forward. Her head hits the ground, hard, and everything goes fuzzy again.
She’s not knocked out, exactly, but she can’t move and she feels… floaty. Nothing even hurts anymore. If she let herself, she could leave, she thinks. She could just be done with this. She wants to be done with all of this bullshit so badly. She’s so tired and she misses Joel and Sam and Henry and Riley.
Riley.
Riley said something to her once. “If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. No matter what, you never stop fighting.” And she hadn’t, not until she died.
Joel nearly bled to death and didn’t stop.
Okay.
Not yet.
She makes herself move and the pain comes back. She can’t walk, can’t get off her hands and knees, but when she’s there, she spots the machete under a bench, so she crawls. Little bit by little bit. Her legs feel like they’re barely working, and all she can focus on is dragging herself forward.
Somehow, she isn’t expecting it when David kicks her in the stomach, and it knocks her down.
She rests her forehead against the dirty carpet. She’s so tired.
“I knew you had heart,” David says. “Y’know, it’s okay to give up.”
Fuck him.
“Ain’t no shame in it.”
She pushes herself back up. A couple more feet. She keeps crawling.
“I guess not. Just not your style, is it?”
God she wishes he would shut up.
He kicks her again, harder, and she feels something crack inside her. She groans, barely managing to hold herself up. She feels, for an awful second, like she might throw up from the pain.
And then he’s on top of her. One hand pinning hers to the floor, one on the back of her head shoving her face down into the carpet. Her stomach lurches. Oh, God, no.
He yanks her head up by her ponytail. “You can try begging.”
“Fuck you.”
The next thing she knows, he shoves her onto her back and wraps his hands around her throat.
“You think you know me? Huh?” he demands, bending close, his breath hot on her face. “Well, let me tell you something.”
She reaches over her head, trying to use her feet to shove herself closer to the machete and away from him, but he drops his weight onto her to pin her. She’s so close. She’s running out of air. The edges of her vision are going black.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” he snarls, but, no, she realizes in horror, she does.
She can feel…
Her fingertips touch the machete handle. She reaches, white spots dancing in her vision, just a little more – and it’s in her hand.
The first blow hits his arm and he rolls off her. And then she follows and he screams right before she brings it down into his face.
Fuck him fuck him fuck his entire creepy asshole fucking cannibal self. She slams it into his head again and again until she sees bone and brain and she’s still not sure if it’s enough. She’s not sure she can ever stop until someone pulls her off.
“Stop! Stop.”
“No! Don't fucking touch me!”
She’s done, she can’t handle this anymore.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me.”
She has her hands on his shoulders before she realizes, and even then her body is still trying to escape.
“Look. Look.” Joel grabs her face and makes her look at him. Makes her see him. “It's me...”
It’s him. He’s awake. He’s alive and he’s awake and he’s here.
She’s crying now. She can’t remember how long she’s been crying.
“He tried to–”
Nothing else comes out but sobs.
And then Joel hugs her. And she was right. Joel hugs are good hugs.
He wraps his arm around her back and holds her close. “Oh, baby girl... It's okay. It's okay.”
“Joel...”
“It's okay now.”
All she can do for a moment is breathe and cry. She can smell his jacket and a hint of gunpowder and feel his arms around her, his hand cradling the back of her head. Her face is pressed against the front of his shirt, smearing blood and tears and God know what else into it, but she can hear his heart beating, fast but steady. He’s alive.
“Hey, you,” she says finally, her voice thick.
He pulls back, but his hands are still on her face, warm and strong and for the first time in weeks, she feels safe. “Look at me. I’ll never let anyone hurt you again, do you understand?”
She doesn't. She does.
She nods.
“Let’s go.”
They don’t go far. The storm is too bad, and she can tell he’s still hurting pretty bad.
But they go far enough to get out of the fucking cannibal town, and they’re not going to be followed. The fucking cannibals are either going to be too distracted by the fire, or they’re going to find what’s left of David’s body. And the bodies she left in her wake. Plus, she’s reasonably confident saying Joel didn’t find her peacefully.
His knuckles are split open, and he keeps trying not to let her see them.
If there are even enough of them left to follow them, they’d be stupid to do it.
She sits in a chair in the living room of the small cabin. She should be doing stuff. Joel is getting firewood and snow for melting and doing all the things that need to be done. He hasn’t even asked her to look around.
“Ellie,” he says and she jumps.
There’s a fire. A fire and a pot of water that used to be snow. How long did she zone out for?
“Why don’t you come over here and warm up a bit?”
She goes and sits next to him, a lot closer than they would normally sit before he got hurt. She hasn’t heard his voice in so long. He’d been so deathly quiet, not even his usual sleep muttering. And he was so cold.
“How about we get some of that blood off you?” he asks.
“Oh. Yeah.” That does sound like something she should do.
Joel is frowning and trying to look like he’s not. After a moment of her not moving, he picks up her hand and a scrap of cloth, and wipes some of the blood off, then moves to the other. She’s going to have to scrub under her nails to get rid of all of it.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t you worry about it. You have nothin’ to apologize for.”
She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. They’re safe now. She’s safe now. He’s awake and moving around, and she doesn’t have to handle everything alone anymore.
So why is she so numb?
He wipes her face off, being extra gentle with the blood still crusted under her nose. Then his eyes flit to her hair, and she can feel it for the first time.
She reaches up and touches her head. Her hair is stiff with blood. She’s just hoping most of it isn’t hers. She thinks she might have hit her head harder than is necessarily good for a person.
Her fingers touch something hard, and she gingerly pulls it out.
It’s bone.
It’s not hers.
“Oh.” She looks at Joel.
He grabs the pot. “I’ll get more snow.”
It takes a while, but she ends up rinsing her hair out in the old bathroom sink. It hurts to bend over and the water isn’t exactly warm, but whatever is in her hair, she wants it out.
Joel knocks on the door. “Ellie? I have your bag.”
Squeezing her hair with a towel, she opens the door.
“Put on some dry clothes, alright?” He starts to move away, then seems to remember something. He digs a hand into his pocket. “Here, I found this. Thought you’d want it back.”
He holds out her switchblade.
She takes it, a little stunned. She thought it was gone forever, along with her backpack. The letter from her mother, her Walkman with the tape from Riley, her pun books and the picture of Joel and his daughter that she has tucked into one of them. She thought everything she owned was gone.
“Dry clothes,” he repeats, and pulls the bathroom door shut.
Wait. Ellie throws her bag onto the counter and practically rips it open. Her ammo is gone, of course, but it looks like they barely searched it. Probably because she had no food. She unzips the inner pocket and sticks her hand in it, down into the hole in the lining. When her fingers brush the bag, she almost cries in joy. They didn’t take the medicine.
She kicks her shoes off and changes her jeans, transferring the pebbles into a clean pair. She thinks she might burn her old jeans.
The bathroom’s cold so she starts to layer up, but by the time she’s got a tank top on, she’s too cold to keep going. Fuck it, she’ll put the rest on in front of the fire. She leaves everything else, including her shoes, on the bathroom floor. She’s cold and she’s tired and she doesn’t care.
Joel’s made her a bed in front of the fire out of old couch cushions and what must be every blanket he could find.
“Go on,” he says, not looking at her as he’s searching through his bag for something.
She dumps her own on the floor next to it and sits on one of the cushions. Oh, man.
“Christ,” Joel says behind her, low, like it was punched out of him. “Ellie, can I see your back?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He moves closer. He pulls the back of her top down a little, and then she tugs the bottom up to her mid-back because she can tell he feels a little weird about it.
“How bad it is, doc?” she tries to joke. It feels wobbly.
Joel moves around in front of her. “Do me a favour and wiggle your toes.”
“Huh?”
She does it anyways, but she’s staring at him like he’s lost his mind.
“Nothin’ feels numb or tingly or anythin’, right?”
She does, but not in the way he means.
“No. Is it actually that bad?”
“Honestly, yeah,” he admits. “Your back’s just all black and blue, kiddo.”
She looks down at her arms. Her shoulder’s gone purple where it slammed into the cage gate, and her arms have bruises the shape of fingerprints all over them, everywhere she’s been grabbed or held down. She thinks at this point she’s more bruise than not.
It even hurts to breathe. She’s pretty sure David broke one of her ribs.
Joel hands her the long-sleeved thermal top she’d dropped when she sat down. “You’re gonna get cold.”
She puts it on, along with the socks he passes to her, and a thick sweater she doesn’t recognize. It’s clean, though, surprisingly soft, and she’s starting to feel truly warm again for the first time in weeks.
“Oh, wait.” She grabs her back and digs out the bag of medicine. “Here, you’re supposed to take more of this.”
He opens the bag. “How the hell did you—”
Halfway through the question, he looks up at her and stops.
It was worth it, but she wishes she had been smarter. She should have shot them both as soon as she had the penicillin in her hands. She could have hidden, waited for them to leave and taken them out from a distance. But she’d been so worried about Joel. She’d just wanted to get back to him and make him better. She was so cold and so hungry and so fucking tired of being alone and afraid all the time.
“Ellie, look at me for a minute,” Joel says. “None of this was your fault. And I am real proud of how you handled all this shit. Alright?”
She’s not sure she believes him, but she nods.
“You should get some sleep.”
She’s a little scared to sleep. Half of her feels like if she falls asleep, she might wake up back in that cage. Or, worse, back in the restaurant. She feels like if she’s not careful, if she closes her eyes, when she opens them she might be right back there on the dirty carpet with his hands on her throat.
But Joel won’t let that happen.
And she truly is so tired.
It’s probably the nicest thing she’s slept on in months, and she can’t help the sigh when she lies down. It’s also the first time in a long time that she hasn’t been at least a little afraid of fucking foot rot.
She expects Joel to leave, to find somewhere for himself to sleep.
And suddenly the thought of it breaks something open inside of her and she’s crying again. Not sobbing like before, but the tears start leaking out down her face, soaking into her hair, and she can’t do anything to stop them.
“Ellie,” Joel says softly. His hand touches her head and she feels him gently stroking her hair back from her face.
“I’m fine,” she insists. She is. She can take care of herself. She took care of herself.
“S’okay if you’re not,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
His fingers touches the sore spot on her head, and she can’t help the sharp inhale at the pain.
“Shit, sorry.”
She’s not upset or anything. Everything hurts – it’s not his fault. She’s glad, really glad, when he doesn’t stop. She doesn’t want him to stop touching her head. It’s like the gentle pass of his hand over her hair is grounding her, keeping her from floating away again.
He’s good at this, she thinks blearily. Being comforting. A few months ago, she would have been surprised. Now, though, it seem right. He must have been such a good dad.
She missed him so much.
“Joel?”
“Hm.”
“Thanks for not dying.”
He makes one of those Joel-noises. “I do my best, kiddo.”
“Swear to me that everything that you said about the Fireflies is true,” she says.
She needs to know the truth. He’s been acting weird since they left Salt Lake City, and the more she thinks about it, the less sense it makes. And everything they’ve been through, he’s never lied to her, not really. He’s bullshitted her, when they were in Jackson last fall, but he’s never deliberately lied to her.
She can feel her heart pounding.
He looks her in the eye and says, “I swear.”
He’s lying.
He’s fucking lying.
“Okay,” she says.
It feels like nothing will ever be okay again.
Summer and fall are… fine. Jackson is so much nicer than the Boston QZ. It’s alive in a way Boston never was. People are always laughing, or just talking about normal things. There’s no military, no Firefly attacks. There’s still bandits and infected, but it feels hopeful. And she’s helpful. It’s good when she can help.
And then it’s late October, and she falls asleep with her window open on a warm evening.
She dreams about David and she can still feel him on top of her when she wakes up, freezing her ass off.
She rolls out of bed before she’s even fully awake, landing hard on one knee before she jerks up to slam the window shut. Then she leans against it, trying to calm her breathing. Trying to make herself stop shaking. It’s not the first time she’s dreamt about him. It’s been more frequent since it started getting cool.
It makes her worry about the winter.
She grabs a blanket off her bed and wraps it around her shoulders, slipping out of her bedroom and across the hall. Joel’s bedroom door is ajar, too. Neither of them sleep well with their doors closed.
He’s still asleep, she can tell by his breathing. She could wake him up. He wouldn’t mind.
Instead, she slips inside his room and sits on the floor next to his bed. Ellie is the only person who can get close to him when he’s asleep. Once when Tommy and Maria came over for dinner, Joel conked out on the couch after they ate, like the old man he is. Tommy went to wake him up to say goodbye before she could stop him, and Joel had him on the floor with a blade at his throat before anyone realized what was going on.
Luckily, Tommy had thought it was hilarious.
She curls up on the floor next to Joel’s bed. It helps when she can hear him breathing.
It helps when she’s not alone.
“No parent would make a different choice about their kid than the one he did,” Tommy says and she can’t stop thinking about it days later.
Joel made it very clear she wasn’t his daughter. She knows he cares about her. He wouldn’t have done what he did if he didn’t care about her. And she can… she can just tell that he cares. She knows him. But it’s not like that.
She’s somehow more confused after talking to Tommy.
The snow comes and it makes things harder. It’s harder to focus in school, work is harder, and her nightmares get worse. She’s spending more time on Joel’s bedroom floor than in her own bed. He never says anything, even when he wakes up before she does. She wonders what she would do if he did.
Maria stops by one morning and asks if Ellie wants to go on a supply run with her.
“Yes!” she says immediately.
“How far?” Joel asks, frowning.
“Just to downtown Jackson.” Maria snorts. “Basically a shopping trip. Nothing wild, I promise.”
He’s still frowning, but Ellie knows that’s also kinda just how his face looks. He sighs. “Go put on warmer clothes first.”
She really likes spending time with Maria. She likes Tommy, too, obviously. He’s really good with horses, like Joel, so she helps him out in the stables a lot. And sometimes she can get him talking and he’ll tell her stories about when him and Joel were kids, and she loves that.
But it is just nice to hang out with someone who isn’t a dude sometimes. And Maria is really cool. She’s always willing to tell Ellie about how things work in Jackson, or how her family set something up, or anything else she’s curious about.
They spend the morning looking through old stores for some of the little odds and ends that people have been needing. Wires, chalk for the school, those kinds of thing. Part of the trip is also to make sure there aren’t too many infected around, Ellie knows, but they’ve only seen one runner and took it out easily.
They break for lunch in an old garage, making a small fire.
“It is sure getting cold,” Maria says after they eat. “You mind if we sit a few minutes longer?”
“Fine by me.” She has a tin mug of hot water with a little honey in it keeping her hands warm. She’s okay not moving quite yet.
It’s a nice silence. Not awkward.
Maria breaks it first. “Ellie, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but… are you doing okay, sweetheart? You’ve been looking so tired lately and I heard you missed a couple shifts at the stable last week. That’s not like you.”
She starts to say she’s fine, like she usually does, but she hesitates.
Maybe… maybe it would be nice to talk to her.
“I… can I tell you something?”
“Anything.”
“Um. Last winter, Joel got hurt,” she says. “At the university. Some hunters attacked us and Joel got hurt really bad. He, um. He almost died. And then a few weeks later, I was out hunting for food and I ran into these two guys. They offered to trade the deer I had shot for antibiotics.”
Maria leans forward. “Jeez.”
“They were from the same group. Most of them just wanted to kill us, but one of the guys I traded the deer with, he was like their leader.” She stares down at the mug in her hands. Five seconds in, ten seconds out. Right, Riley? “He took me back to their base. He said I was special.”
It makes her shudder to say it, and she knows Maria understands.
“Oh, Ellie…”
“He… didn’t,” she says uncomfortably. She touches her throat without meaning to. It took over a week before she could speak or swallow without pain. Sometimes she can still feel it. “But he… wanted to.”
The stupid thing is sometimes she second guesses herself. She wants to believe she’s wrong, that he just wanted to kill her. A lot of people have wanted to kill her, though most didn’t make it so personal. But that isn’t how it happened. It’s not something she thinks about constantly, thank God, but she’s had enough late nights awake remembering it, especially lately. She remembers how he looked at her and how he touched her and what she felt and she knows. She knows.
“He tried to,” she corrects herself. It’s what she said to Joel when he pulled her off David’s body. It’s the truth. “But I smashed his head in with a machete first.”
“Good girl,” Maria say fiercely and it surprises a small smile out of her. “Ellie, I am so sorry that happened to you. Thank you for telling me.”
“Also they were eating people.”
“Shit.”
Her fingers are aching. She’s been holding onto her mug too tightly. She puts it down next to her.
“I’m okay,” she says, and it’s mostly true. “I’ll be okay.”
“You will.” Maria reaches over and squeezes her hand. Her hand is a little cold, but gentle. “I know you will.”
She was right, Ellie thinks. Talking to Maria about it did help. She knows Joel would listen. He knows the broad strokes of things, and he’s not stupid. She didn’t tell him every detail, but she didn’t need to for him to understand and she’s glad for that. It’s just… different.
They put the fire out and go back to work.
On the way back home, Ellie glances at Maria. She fiddles with the pebbles in her pocket. “Can I actually ask you something?”
“You sure can.”
“Did Tommy tell you what happened with the Fireflies?”
Maria shakes her head. “He promised Joel he wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t promise anything,” she says, but she doesn’t say anything else.
“Yeah,” Maria says. “And I didn’t promise not to listen in on them.”
Ellie stares.
Maria just shrugs. “If you’re asking what I would have done, I’d do just about anything for a cure,” she says. “But I’d burn this whole damn world to the ground before I sacrificed my kid for one.”
It hits her before she realizes what happens, and Maria is looking at her like she’s lost it – hell, maybe she has – but she can’t stop giggling.
“Tommy said the same thing,” she wheezes. “You ever think you Millers are just violent?”
Maria laughs out loud and wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, well, you’re one of us now, kid. So what does that say about you?”
It’s a couple weeks before she has another nightmare. It’s a bad one, waking her in a sweat, and she realizes it’s storming. She lies awake for a long time, listening to the wind howl outside, then gives up and sneaks across the hall to Joel’s room.
This time, though, she hesitates for a second before sitting on the side of his bed. He’s awake by the time she touches his shoulder.
“Joel.”
“You okay?” he asks, voice rough with sleep.
She swallows. “Bad dream.”
He yawns. “You wanna crawl in with me?”
He says it so easily, like it’s automatic. For a moment, she wonders if he’s fully awake, if he realizes who she actually is, and then she feels immediately guilty. That isn’t fair to him.
The floor gets really hard, though.
“Okay.”
He moves over to make room and she slides in under the covers, curling up into a ball. She expects it to be a little weird, but it reminds her of sleeping in the basement, close enough to put her hand on his chest to make sure he was still breathing whenever she woke up. Less scary, but still familiar.
“Do you need more blankets on your bed?” he asks a moment later.
“Huh?”
“Or socks? Have you considered sleepin’ in socks?”
That’s when she realizes she has her toes pressed up again the side of his leg and, okay, her feet are a little cold. And as usual, he’s so warm.
She snickers quietly. “Well, I’m not moving now.”
“Of course you’re not.” He folds his arm under his head. “If you weren’t annoyin’ me, I’d think you were sick.”
“Fuck you,” she says, grinning.
She’s almost asleep when she hears him say her name.
“Ellie, I know this winter’s been hard on you,” he says. “Don’t think you need to bear it all alone, alright? Whole lot of people in this town care a whole lot about you.”
She’s starting to get that.
It’s time. They’ve been in Jackson for over six months. It’s a new year. They can’t stay in limbo forever.
She puts the pebbles back in her pocket and goes downstairs to find Joel. She finds him in the kitchen, washing the dishes from dinner, and she just watches him for a moment. He’s happy here, a quiet, gentle kind of happy. This life suits him. Fixing things, helping people. People like him. He’s not used to it.
She’s been thinking about last winter, and everything she did to save him. Fighting her way through that mall to find supplies to sew him up, hunting for food, weeks of caring for him, getting the medicine for him. Everything with David. All the people she killed. She doesn’t remember their faces and she doesn’t regret it.
She’s been thinking about Sarah. Joel talks about her more now, and Tommy will cautiously, carefully bring her up now and then. Sometimes he’ll tell a story and Joel has to leave, has to go for a walk, but he hasn’t told Tommy to stop. And Ellie knows one thing for sure – that girl really loved her dad. And she had a dad who would do anything for her.
She’s been thinking about how fucking unfair it was for Sarah to die. That no matter what anyone told themselves, it was a stupid, meaningless thing. A girl younger than her dying didn’t make anyone safer, didn’t make anything better. It just made a kid dead and it made people miss her.
She’s been thinking what it would have felt like if she hadn’t been able to save Joel. She’s been thinking about how badly she missed him when he was unconscious and how alone she felt, how scared she’d been for so long that he was going to die, and how relieved and happy she was to see him awake again.
She’s been thinking a lot.
She takes a couple silent steps back, then hits the squeaky boards when she comes back into the kitchen.
“Hey, you.”
“Good timin’,” he says. “You can dry.”
“In a minute.” Oh, man, this is harder than she thought it would be. “Um. This is weird. I need to say something to you, but if you look at me I’m either going to cry or hit you so can you… not. Just. For a minute.”
His back tenses. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she repeats. Five seconds in, ten seconds out. “Okay, so first of all I’m not going to pretend anymore that I don’t know what happened with the Fireflies.”
There, it’s out. She feels lighter, almost dizzy. It’s not the end, but it’s out.
“It’s kind of killing me, Joel,” she says. He has to know. If this is going to work, and she wants it to work, he needs to understand. “I feel so useless, like nothing I did since leaving Boston mattered.”
“Ellie—”
“Please just listen.”
He stops.
“That wasn’t fair. People died for me. You made me feel like that was for nothing.” Five in, ten out. She can do this. “It should have been my choice. They should have asked. You should have let me choose. You took that away from me, too.”
She sees him nod.
“You lied to me.” That hurts more than anything. She understands why he did what he did. But he shouldn’t have lied to her. It was a coward’s move and Joel isn't a coward. “You can’t ever lie to me again, Joel. I can’t forgive you for that twice.”
“I won’t,” he says.
She believes him.
Despite everything, she believes him. Joel is not a monster. He’s just human. People make mistakes. They don’t usually make world-altering mistakes, but they make mistakes. She lives with her own every day. If she can’t try to forgive him for his, what hope does she have for forgiving herself?
“Okay,” she says, and things aren’t okay.
But they could be.
She’s not expecting him to ask, “What would you have chosen?”
Yeah, she’s been thinking about that, too. At the weirdest moments – when she’s letting one of the horses eat oats out of her hand, when Joel is teaching her a new chord on her guitar, when she’s biting into a fresh peach only seconds off the tree and still warm from the sun. All the things she might not have done if she died for the cure.
But she thinks about it, too, whenever she has to kill an infected. Could have gotten rid of these things, and all she would have had to do was die.
“I don’t know,” she says truthfully. “I want to say I would have done it. All I wanted to do was help them find a cure. But no one was asking me to die for one. Guess I’ll never really know what I would have done.”
There’s an awkward silence.
Well. She might as well make it more awkward.
She crosses over to him and hugs him, leaning her forehead against his back. He looks like he could use it, even though she can’t see his face.
“I would have picked you, though,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“If you were the one immune instead of me,” she says. She’s been trying to put herself in his shoes. She asked Maria and Tommy the same question. Seemed only fair to ask herself it. “I wouldn’t have been able to let you die. So maybe I’m just a hypocrite.”
The last thing Ellie expects him to do is turn around and hug her back.
It’s surprises a frankly embarrassing sound out of her. “Hi,” she covers.
“Hi,” he says against her hair.
He’s dripping soapy water down her back and it’s soaking into her shirt. But, honestly, she couldn’t give less of a fuck right now.
Joel hugs are the best hugs.
She’s barely taken the last bite of her breakfast when Joel snatches her plate away and drops it in the sink. He’s been antsy all morning.
“What’s with you? How much coffee have you had?”
“I want to show you something. Get your coat.”
“I’m still fucking chewing,” she protests but gets up.
It’s really early. She’d been woken up by Joel banging around in the kitchen, which was weird enough that she wasn’t even mad at how early it was. He’s not a loud guy, even now. She’d had a moment of anxiety that something was wrong until she smelled food.
It’s so early that the community center is still empty. They’re finishing the final touches and doing a big grand opening party at the end of the week. Ellie’s pretty sure people in Jackson just like an excuse to throw a party.
“Is it a dinosaur?” she asks.
“No. C’mon.”
He leads her over to a door off the main room. She knows there’s a little room behind it. The church in Bill’s town had one too, but she doesn’t know enough about churches to know what it used to be used for.
He looks like he’s trying to figure out what to say, then abruptly turns away and opens the door.
The last time she saw this room, it was completely empty. Now there’s a shelf running the entire length of the room. All around, there are toys and old cloth flowers and other random things. The walls have a pattern on them, she thinks at first, but then she realizes.
It’s names.
“It’s somethin’ people used to do,” Joel says behind her. “A memorial, it’s called.”
When she turns around, he’s holding a small bottle of paint and a paintbrush.
“Only if you want to,” he says.
She takes it from him. “People would leave stuff?”
“Mhm. Flowers, candles, cards or notes. Pictures. Toys if it was for a kid. Helped them feel… closer, I guess.”
“What happened to it?”
“It – it depended, but this is gonna stay here for good. We’re gonna have someone keep it tidy, dust it and all, but it stays.”
She nods. She takes a moment, looking around the room. Some of them are full names, some with birth and death dates, some only first names.
Okay.
She finds an empty spot and opens the paint. When she glances at Joel, he’s nearby, holding a jar himself, and just staring.
He’s gonna need a minute.
She dips the brush in, and writes. Tess. Sam. Henry.
Then, Riley Abel. She fills in Riley’s birthday and when she died, then sketches the outline of the tape Riley gave her. She can draw it from memory, and it turns out pretty good.
She puts the paint away and checks on Joel.
Sarah Miller, 2001-2013 isn’t too far away from Riley’s name. Maybe Henry was right, about heaven. Maybe him and Sam and Riley and Sarah are all hanging out, laughing at them. She doesn’t really believe it, but it’s a nice thought.
Joel takes something out of his pocket and sets it on the shelf under Sarah’s name. It’s a soccer ball on a keychain.
“Looks nice,” she says softly.
He just nods, and that’s okay.
She gives his arm a squeeze and gives him another moment. She’s decided something, too.
Ellie takes the pebbles out of her pocket. Riley, Tess, Sam, Henry. She puts the pebbles on the shelf, counts them one more time, and then lets them go.
Joel puts an arm around her shoulder, and she leans against him. She’s feeling a little wobbly, but he’s solid and she trusts him to keep her steady.