Archive of Our Own ^beta

1

They’ve only been walking for an hour before darkness begins to eat away at the daylight.

Ellie’s feet hurt. After days handcuffed to that radiator—after thirteen years never leaving the same block in the QZ—this new world, wide and rolling and utterly quiet, is more than she’s accustomed to. She can feel the shape of every rock under her feet as they press up through the flimsy soles of her Converse.

After the State House, it only took twenty minutes for the city to slip away entirely into suburbs. Large houses with vined siding and broken windows—it made Ellie nervous, all the pockets of space she couldn’t lay eyes on. There were strip malls, too, with identical cracking red signs above each storefront, displaying the services of twenty years past that made little sense to her: EZ DRY CLEANERS, BRONZED BERRY TANNING, EDEN’S MASSAGE.

And forty minutes after that, the suburbs give way to open forest. Even though the sky remains a stubborn, stony cornflower blue, the moon is already visible between the trees. A little over half-full; or maybe half-empty, since Ellie’s feeling so miserable about her current situation.

They walk along the thin bank between the water and the woods. It’s muddy at the river’s edge; all the rain from the night before makes the ground soft. The wet dirt is already creeping up the sides of Ellie’s sneakers, staining the maroon canvas. It’s colder out here than in the QZ; she can’t figure out why. Open air, maybe. A lack of people slammed together like sardines. Goosebumps crawl up her arms, down her legs. Then again, maybe she’s just scared.

The back of Joel’s neck wrinkles when he looks up at the sky. He does that a lot, and for some reason, it pisses Ellie off. Look around, dickhead. Infected don’t fall from the sky. Except, he’s doing that, too. His head pretty much never stays still. The one direction he never looks is back—the one thing he never looks at is her.

They haven’t spoken, not since the State House. Somehow, they’ve still come to an understanding, fallen into a rhythm. Joel leads, Ellie follows. Ellie glares daggers into the back of Joel’s neck, Joel doesn’t spare her a second glance. He doesn’t even spare her a first. He lets her know when they’re done walking for the night with a jerk of his head toward a nearby clearing beyond the edge of the woods. Ellie follows, because she doesn’t have much else of a choice.

It’s crossed her mind more than once, the things grown men do to girls when they get the chance. She can’t help but imagine it, what might happen to her now that Tess is dead. Joel doesn’t seem like the type (like Officer Blaine or her sixth-grade history teacher), but Ellie knows better than to trust her instincts. Anyone, anytime, anywhere. That’s what the older girls at FEDRA taught her. They taught her to never be out of reach of her knife; Ellie has it tucked in her hoodie pocket, the pad of her thumb running against the handle.

But Joel just leads them through the thin copse of trees and into the small glade, the darkening sky casting their skin blue. He uses the flat of his boot to brush away sticks and leaf litter, leaving a fresh, smooth bed of dirt for them to sleep on. Ellie’s never slept on the ground before; for what FEDRA was worth, she always had a bed of her own. It makes her feel silly and young, the way desolation traipses through her at the prospect of hard dirt beneath her back.

While the wind is less powerful between the cover of the trees, it whispers as it passes through branches and leaves. The sound is unnerving, foreign to Ellie. She slings her backpack off of one shoulder and hugs it to her chest before taking a seat on the ground. Joel stares down at his boots for a moment before following her lead, resting his back against a tree. Several feet of space hovers between them, as if close proximity would send them up in flames.

Hunger grips and swipes at her stomach, and Ellie wants more than anything to dig into more of the food Marlene packed for her. But it feels like they’re both waiting for something, her and Joel. Like they’re both waiting for the other to break first, and she isn’t going to be giving him the satisfaction. Not for the guy who can just leave his girlfriend-partner-whatever at the first sign of trouble. (That’s not fair to him; Ellie knows it’s not. But the fear can’t help but worm its way through her, the assurance that he would probably do the same to her. However much she hates him, Ellie still doesn’t want to be alone).

A low, chilly breeze passes through their clearing; for Joel, it seems to snap something into place. He blinks and unzips his backpack.

“Marlene pack you more food?”

Ellie nods. Joel nods back.

“Good. Eat.”

And that’s that.

Having something to do seems to loosen the tension between them, just a little. It’s nice to be able to focus on something besides their mutual agreement to not speak to one another. Though, Joel doesn’t seem to care nearly as much as Ellie does. (It doesn’t seem to be as difficult for him to stay quiet, either. Ellie wants to scream at him and throw dirt in his face, and all Joel seems to want to do is stare at nothing and run the pad of his thumb over his broken watch).

By the time they’re finished, the sky has turned indigo, and the moon is aglow, casting planes of white light through the trees. When Ellie pushes herself to her feet, it startles Joel out of another rumination. He stares at her, bewildered.

“I have to piss,” she says, eyes narrowed.

He doesn’t respond, just stares down at his hands, which are curled in his lap. Even though he can’t see it, Ellie rolls her eyes and heads back the way they came, into a thicker part of the forest.

In the short walk back to their camp—though she probably wouldn’t give the circle of dirt that much credit—the air seems to cool by degrees, sending shivers running through her from top to bottom. She crosses her arms across her chest as she steps back into the glade. Joel’s standing now, too.

When he begins to remove his coat, anxiety ratchets all the way down into her hands, like someone’s pressing quarters hard and heavy into her palms. Jacket fisted in one hand, Joel steps forward to offer it out to her and, on instinct, Ellie steps back, one foot in a lunge and the other in a shuffle.

Something pinches between his eyebrows, expression pained, like he wants to apologize but can’t grasp the words. Ellie can’t think much beyond her heart hammering in her throat and the fear shaking her body.

Eventually he settles on, “Take it.”

“No,” she replies bluntly, a small waver in her voice.

Joel nudges the coat toward her once again. “You’re cold.”

“No.”

Silence grows like ivy between them as he stares—first at her, then the coat in his hand, then her once more. Ellie holds his gaze even when he can’t hold it back. Even when it makes her afraid.

Finally, Joel retracts the coat and retreats to his tree. He doesn’t put it back on, just sets it at his side. Ellie mirrors his movements, slowly, warily, never turning her back to him. When she’s seated, she pulls her pack back into her arms and sandwiches it between her chest and her thighs.

“Sleep,” Joel says, still avoiding her gaze. He clears his throat. “I’ll keep watch.”

Keep watch. It’s not something she realized they would have to do, though it makes her feel stupid for not thinking about it. Even though there’s been no sight of anyone out here, Infected or otherwise, the world outside the QZ isn’t barren. But the thought of sitting up all night, just waiting for someone to materialize out of the darkness, makes her feel a little sick. Ellie sets her backpack onto the dirt and uses it for a pillow, curling up sideways, facing Joel.

Somehow, she sleeps.

-

Ellie wakes to the sound of a woman screaming.

Heart shooting up into her throat, she shoves her hands onto the packed earth and sits up, whipping her head around. It’s as if the noise is surrounding her, closing in on her.

Remembering Joel, she finds the shape of him in the dark and blinks the blurriness out of her vision, letting her eyes adjust. He’s staring back, wary and resigned, as if he was anticipating this.

“What—”

“Just a fox,” he murmurs, and something in the timbre of his voice is oddly reassuring. “S’okay.”

A fucking fox. Ellie’s only ever seen them in books—one of the many animals that don’t slip through the walls of the QZ. She blows out a breath, and feels goosebumps trail up her arms, down her legs. Again, she shivers. Fucking dammit.

“Go back to sleep,” Joel says. And, for some reason, Ellie listens.

Gingerly, she lays back down and, after a moment of thought, rolls over so her back is facing him. If he’s planning on killing her—if he’s planning on worse—he’s had plenty of good chances to do it by now.

However, sleep doesn’t come to her. For what feels like hours—but can’t be more than thirty or forty minutes—she lays, curled and still trembling a little, with her eyes closed and her mind wide awake.

Just when she’s about to give up entirely, Ellie hears shuffling from behind her. A grunt as Joel gets to his feet. Footsteps creep toward her, and Ellie’s body becomes a statue, immobile and stony. She barely breathes.

But all he does is drape something over her shoulders. His jacket, she realizes. It’s big; with the way she’s curled into a ball, the hem nearly reaches her ankle. For a long moment, all Ellie hears is Joel’s breath, low and wary. Then retreating footsteps, as he ambles back over to his tree.

In tiny, slow movements, when she can be sure he won’t see it, Ellie reaches her hand up and rubs the coat’s inner lining between her fingers. It’s soft to the touch, a kind of suede. It’s a small piece of softness among this brave new world, a buoy against the hard ground and the early autumn chill.

She sleeps.

2

It still hasn’t snowed by the time Joel and Ellie reach Hamlet, Nebraska, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t freezing.

As they trekked closer and closer to the Nebraska-Wyoming border, sleet pelted down on them for three days straight. Joel tried to convince Ellie to hunker down in an old garage to wait it out, but stalling progress felt too much like failure. Her thoughts felt too close when they weren’t moving. Riley. Tess. Sam. Henry. Like a mantra, the names whorled through her mind, ensuring that she kept going forward.

They found winter coats and camping gear in an abandoned neighborhood a couple weeks before the storm hit, but they still ended their days soaked through, letting the fire dry them out before they tucked into their sleeping bags.

Hamlet is a weird place. They’re skirting around the edge of the actual town town (they try to avoid actual town towns if they can), and all they’ve really seen so far are mobile home parks and camping grounds. Right before sundown, though, when they wander closer to the highway, they find a gas station.

It’s unlike any she’s seen before; from the outside, it looks exactly like a regular brick house that someone would live in. The two gas pumps in front of the structure have long since been destroyed, but inside, there’s the rotting, scattered remains of shelves and items that make up a convenience store. At least, that’s what she sees when she turns to look through the dirt-hazed window.

Ellie waits while Joel scopes the place out, leaning back on the outer wall and kicking one heel against the brick. Exhaustion tugs heavy on her eyelids. There are sometimes just days like this, she’s beginning to realize. When all the walking and hiding and fighting catches up to her in one fell swoop. When she can’t seem to shake off the endlessness of their journey towards Cody.

“S’clear.”

Joel’s voice startles her; he’s got half his body sticking out of the doorframe, hand clasped around the shoulder strap of his rifle.

“Scared me,” she mumbles.

He frowns an apology and scratches behind his ear. “There was one Infected in the back office, but it was long gone.”

Ellie nods, and he holds the door open wider for her. When she ducks under his arm and into the building, the sun blazes orange and purple behind her.

With a heavy sigh, she heads toward the far corner of the store, the one partially concealed by the counter. She brings both her arms up behind her head so she can dig her fingers into her sore shoulder blades. It’s still pretty freezing in here; there must be a hole in the wall or something. Ellie keeps her coat zipped and her hood up when she slips her backpack off of one shoulder and undoes the straps on their sleeping bag (just one—Joel’s been letting her use it for the most part, since he runs an internal temperature of about 250 degrees).

“You alright?” he asks as she unrolls the bag and tucks it into the corner. The words sound less awkward coming out of his mouth than they used to; after Henry and Sam, Joel is less weird about that kind of thing. Checking in. Telling her she’s doing a good job. It’s weird, but nice.

She shrugs. “Tired.”

“Go to sleep; I’ll take first watch.”

“Hah.” Ellie quirks one corner of her mouth up at him. The odds of Joel actually waking her up to take a second watch are roughly one in ten these days. She has a working theory that he’s a cyborg who doesn’t need rest.

The zipper on the sleeping bag gets stuck on the same corner every time, but it’s enough space for her to slip inside. As she gets situated with a spare sweatshirt under her head, Joel takes a seat against the wall beside her, rifle on the floor next to his hip.

“Wake me up later,” she urges.

He tilts his head to look down at her. “I will.”

“Seriously, dude.”

“Seriously.” He nods.

Ellie stares him down for another moment and then shifts around to her other side, facing the wall. Sleep’s already dragging her beneath the surface of consciousness, but she finds a thought tugging at her, keeping her just-slightly-awake.

“Do you want the sleeping bag?” she mumbles. Even though he always declines, Ellie always offers.

Joel laughs through his nose. “You’re already in it.”

“It’s cold.”

“I’m fine, kiddo.”

“Whatever,” she sniffs. “Freeze to death, I don’t care.”

“Thanks, I will.”

It takes a while, but the flannel lining of the sleeping bag brings a steady warmth back into Ellie’s skin, and she falls asleep to the sound of Joel’s even breaths beside her.

-

The dark of night surrounds Ellie when she moils her way out of sleep—it feels like she’s only been resting two or three hours. Every muscle in her body seems to be shivering, the kind of cold that makes her bones ache. The part that freaks her out is that she can’t bring herself to stop, no matter how tightly she tenses her muscles.

“Go back to sleep, kiddo,” Joel murmurs.

When Ellie shifts to her other side to look at him, he’s already staring down at her, all tired eyes and downturned mouth. His words are soft, practiced, like he’s told her this a hundred times on a hundred different nights. Maybe he has; she can’t remember.

Though she fell asleep with the hood of her coat pulled up, it’s bunched around at her neck now, and a pinch of pain rolls through the hollow where her shoulders meet her spine. Her throat is dry, and her head is full, pounding. Ellie knows this feeling, though it’s been four years since she last felt it.

All the FEDRA girls got the flu that winter; one of the younger ones even died. It wasn’t often that Ellie got sick, but when she did, it always came on fast. She’d wake up feeling perfectly normal and, by third period, become listless and feverish.

“Cold,” she manages to tell Joel, but by the time the word creaks out of her throat, he’s already leaning over her, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead.

“Shit,” he curses. “Sit up.”

Then the sleeping bag is being unzipped, stripped away. Frigid air bombards Ellie and she hums her disagreement, curling in on herself further. Shoving her arms into her stomach, she pushes her forehead into the space where her knees meet her thighs.

Joel doesn’t let her twine herself any further. “Sit up,” he repeats lowly, and grasps her shoulders.

With his help, Ellie tows her body upright, one leg curled up on the ground and the other with the sole of her shoe pressed into the floor. She slumps forward and shudders into herself, letting her head hang against the inside of her knee.

“You have a fever.”

Joel’s digging through his backpack, then, and Ellie can’t quite figure out why. The toe of his boot covers the toe of hers, as if the small bit of contact will keep her upright.

“I’m okay.” She’s not sure why she says it; they both know she’s not.

Ellie remembers what happened to people who got sick in the QZ, people who didn’t have access to FEDRA infirmaries. She remembers the man in the navy-blue beanie who sat against the wall outside of her school’s courtyard on a February night and died. Riley saw him from the cafeteria window the next morning.

Joel shakes his head. “Shouldn’t’ve let you walk in that sleet.”

From his tan backpack emerges an unlabeled pill bottle, the white plastic striking against the dark shapes of the gas station. The thin rattle it lets out in Joel’s hand makes something swoop anxiously in Ellie’s stomach—it’s almost empty. When he twists the cap off and turns the bottle upside down, two little oblong pills fall into his palm. They found the Tylenol in a backpack still strapped to a body about 40 miles outside the Lincoln, NE quarantine zone. Gunshot wound to the head, self-inflicted if Ellie had to guess. There were only six pills to begin with.

With his free hand, Joel snags their canteen out of his backpack, too. A quarter full—they’d planned to walk along the river tomorrow to gather and boil some more. Ellie doesn’t protest, just grips the canteen in a shaking, too-weak hand and grabs one of the pills.

Joel shakes his head. “Both.”

Ellie shakes her head right back. “We should save it.”

When he drops the second pill into her palm from his, Ellie can’t muster enough energy to argue. She pops the Tylenol into her mouth and swallows them with water, wincing at the way it makes her throat sting. It feels like she swallowed glass in her sleep.

“Alright?” Joel asks.

Ellie blinks once, slowly, in assent. He nods.

“Alright. Go back to sleep; you’ll feel better when you wake up.”

His voice sounds entirely too pleading to be believable.

-

Ellie feels less like she’s slipped into consciousness and more like she’s buried beneath it. Trapped within dreams that slide away nearly as soon as they come, each leaving her with the distinct impression that they were all the same, some futile task.

Waking up again is worse.

Sunlight ekes its way through the cloudy windows of the gas station, casting a dull, brassy shine on Ellie’s surroundings. Though dim, the light still hurts somewhere behind her eyes. Her head feels cotton-packed, her throat still shredded. The shaking hasn’t abated, and the warm, dry feeling of her own skin is a clear indicator that the medicine never broke her fever.

Joel’s looking down at her, still sitting, still wedged between her and the counter. The lack of sleep has made his eyes go puffy and dark; the wrinkles lining his skin seem grooved even deeper than before. The worst of it is the downward slump to his shoulders, as if he’s failed her. As if he tried, and he failed. Ellie gets scared when Joel gets defeated.

“How’re you feelin’?”

Ellie flutters her eyes closed, weakness falling over her shoulders like a cloak. She tries to think of an answer but forgets what Joel even asked her before she can come up with anything.

Shifting to face her fully, Joel cups a hand over her shoulder and jostles her a bit. He seems unnerved by her silence.

“Ellie, c’mon.”

She feels herself falling back asleep; the sensation tugging like a string on the back of her neck. Then, the sleeping bag is unzipped, tugged away from her once again. Once again, Joel’s hands are pulling her up by the shoulders, a hushed sit up murmured under his breath. It’s so eerily like what occurred hours before, and for a moment Ellie wonders whether she’s still stuck in that dream.

Joel reaches forward and unzips her coat. She hums—nearly whines—her disapproval.

“This ain’t doin’ you any good right now, kiddo.”

His hands are gentle as they begin to tug the flannel-lined fabric from her shoulders. The momentum sends her forward, forehead smushing against his shoulder. It’s not what she meant to do, but she finds that the plane of his chest is softer than it looks, and she melts into him, still barely cognizant.

“Okay,” he says, voice suddenly reedy with worry. “You’re alright.”

Hands on her shoulders once more, Joel pushes her back, assessing. Ellie’s eyes feel heavy, and her quavers have taken on a jerkier, more violent nature now that she’s down two layers.

“Joel,” she whispers, and hopes her voice contains the gravity of the situation.

“I know.”

He stares at her for a long moment, the fingers of his right hand flexing and unflexing.

“There’s a hospital close by,” he finally says. His voice is tentative—very nearly unsure—more than she’s ever heard it. “Saw the exit sign on the highway, remember? Should only be a few miles.”

There’s significance in what he’s saying, Ellie knows, but her mind can’t parse through the information to form any sort of conclusion. All the same, his tone weaves a curl of fear through her sternum.

“Hospital?”

Joel nods, squares his shoulders. “I’m gonna search through it. I’m gonna find somethin’ for you.”

Fuck. Ellie shakes her head and brings her wrists up, knocking his hands off of her. Then, at the loss of contact, she inhales sharply and grabs the loose denim at the cuff of his jeans.

“No.”

“Yes. You ain’t gonna get better otherwise.”

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if she dies in this stupid gas station, not if it means Joel dies first. Not if it means she dies alone.

“You can’t go.” This time, her voice comes out high-pitched and thin.

“It’ll only be a few hours.”

Liar. The trip there, the trip back, searching an entire hospital. It’ll take all day.

“You said—” a particularly sharp inhale leads to a succession of coughs wracking her chest “—you said no hospitals. You said they’re not worth it. That they’re full of Infected.”

“I know what I said—”

“—then don’t go!” she pleads. “If you get bit…”

If you get bit, I’m dead. If you get bit, I can’t save you.

“I ain’t getting bit.” Joel’s eyes are wide in the way they always are when he’s trying to get her to trust him. Look at me, he’d said, crouched behind a car in Kansas City. They’re not gonna hit you. “I’m going.”

Ellie purses her lips to stop them from shaking, but she can’t bring herself to nod. She just lets go of Joel’s jeans and curls her arms around her knees, staring down at the tips of her boots.

Brow set, Joel grabs his pack and starts rifling through it, taking out all of the food and the water and leaving it for Ellie. The small pile sinks something in her chest, even though it only makes sense. Either he’ll be back for it later or he won’t be needing it at all. He pulls her handgun—the one she stole from Bill and Frank’s—out of her backpack and sets that beside her, too.

She watches, and she shivers, as he gathers his things, gathers the rifle, and gets to his feet with a small grunt. She watches him stare down at her.

“Don’t put your coat on.” His voice is stern. “Don’t get back in the sleeping bag.”

Ellie sniffs. When she speaks, her voice comes out tiny. “I’m really cold, Joel.”  

At that, something abates. Something in the hinge of his shoulders, in the pinch of his mouth. Something melts. Wordlessly, Joel shrugs off his backpack, then his coat, and crouches down to drape the heavy thing around her shoulders. Immediately, Ellie’s encased in the warmth leftover from his body heat. She knows it’s not conducive to lowering her own temperature, but she can’t bring herself to care. Not if Joel doesn’t.

It’s silly, really. Her own coat’s right there, lying on the ground. If Joel wanted her to have a coat on, he would’ve let her keep that one. But neither of them mentions it. Instead, Ellie tries one more time:

“You don’t have to go.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I do.”

And, well, she doesn’t really have a leg to stand on when he’s looking at her like she’s a rainbow, like she’s hazy and impermanent.

She worries she’s probably looking at him the same exact way.

“Just go on to sleep now.” He tugs once at the collar of his coat, pulling it tighter around her. “Sleep, and I’ll be back when you wake up again.”

Ellie stares up at him, hating the way she can feel the downturned slope of her mouth.

“I’ll be back for my coat,” Joel says.

It sounds a lot like, I’ll be back for you.

-

Joel’s not back when she wakes up again. Joel’s not back, and Ellie’s worse.

It’s hard to navigate her way out of sleep, but she forces her eyes open against the dying light outside. Almost dark—Joel’s been gone sunup to sunset. As if in tandem with the anxiety lumbering its way up her sternum, Ellie yawns, and her lips crack in two separate places. Her throat feels rawer than ever.

It’s not time to panic, she reasons. Not yet. It’s not time to panic, but her body doesn’t seem to agree. Deep-seated, almost rhythmic convulsions begin to shake her frame.

Suddenly, it’s impossible for Ellie to ignore how alone she is. For the first time in months, there’s no Joel hanging around as her shadow. (Though, it’s more like she’s his shadow). There’s no Joel to grab her arm when she trips, snatch the matchbox from her hands when she can’t get one to light, or shake her shoulder to wake her up, every single sunrise. She’s forced to grapple with the idea that Joel might be lost to that hospital—bit, hurt, dead.

And though the thought makes her feel small, Ellie finds herself becoming even smaller, curling into her corner of the gas station. Joel’s coat is warm, reflecting her fever back at her, and she curls it tighter around herself, bunching her hands around the extra fabric hanging at the sleeves.

So lost in her own rumination, mind in such a fog, there’s a half-second delay to Ellie’s panic when the front door creaks open on rusted hinges. Heart jumping into her throat, she scrambles for the pistol at her side right as a gruff, exhausted voice calls out to her:

“Ellie?”

She peeks her eyes over the lip of the front counter, just in case. Joel’s standing on the dirt-laden mat in front of the doorway. His shoulders are slumped, and his hair is a wreck. He looks like death warmed over and he’s the best thing Ellie thinks she’s ever seen.

The tears come almost instantly, and entirely involuntarily.

Joel rushes over, kneeling in front of her, on top of the discarded sleeping bag.

“Hey,” he shushes, a little awkwardly. “You feelin’ worse?”

Ellie shakes her head, even though she is feeling worse. The crying is already making her head throb in tandem with her heartbeat. All of her feelings tingle right underneath her skin, and she can’t seem to get them to back down.

“You—I—” she blubbers, then shoves her palms into her face.

“You’re okay.” Joel sounds a little panicked, though this time Ellie thinks it has more to do with the tears than with the state of her health. “Look, I found medicine.”

She sniffs, and scrubs at her face with Joel’s jacket sleeves before daring to make further eye contact. He’s got his arm halfway down into his backpack, and he digs out a blister pack of large white pills and shakes his head in disbelief.

“They’re twenty years old, but they’ll do just fine, I think. Got some more painkillers, too.”

“You didn’t die,” Ellie breathes. Her brain is still whirring, still trying to catch up amidst the slow hum of her anxious thoughts.

“‘Course I didn’t.” One side of Joel’s mouth quirks up when he says it.

Reaching out with shaking hands, Ellie grabs the blister pack out of his hands, popping one pill out of its foil cover.

She doesn’t give his jacket back. Joel doesn’t ask for it.

3

Amidst the thick carpets of snow falling around them, this patch of Coloradan forest seems labyrinthine. Large, ropy trees seem to emerge out of the blur ahead, blocking and redirecting their path, over and over. The blankets of snow stretch so tall in some places that the wet chill seeps through their jeans up to the mid-calf. Higher, on Ellie.

She’s pretty sure they’re going to die out here.

With the lake stretching northeast and the resort at their back, there is no other way to go but west. Westward, into the dense forest and up, up, up towards the Rockies. Their craggy gray slate peaks are imposing, webbed with clean white snow. Something about them makes Ellie avert her eyes, whenever she catches a glimpse through a break in the storm.

Joel loses his footing, stumbles on something neither of them can see through the layers of snow covering the ground. It yanks Ellie out of her own mind, and all she finds in her body is fear. When Joel straightens up, she piles herself even closer to his side. Her hands shake with their own emptiness.

“Backpack,” she murmurs, and stops in her tracks. Her voice is carried away by the wind, so she tries again. “Need my backpack.”

Turning to face her, Joel stares down at the dirty, green-and-blue backpack gripped in his left hand. He wears a half-dazed expression that Ellie’s sure is mirrored on her own face. Taking the pack out of his hands, Ellie unzips the frontmost pocket and peers inside. With a jolt, she realizes her pistol is gone.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tries to remember where she lost it. Her memories of before she was taken—of when she was taken—are a formless, misshapen mess. She was escaping on Callus. She was shooting at David and his men. It must have been lost in the snow when she went down. Either that, or one of those fuckfaces took it.

Still, she’s not weaponless. Ellie digs her hand into her pack and clasps her hand around glossed wood, smooth metal. In the low light of the snowstorm, her switchblade still gleams.

Then, Joel’s thick coat slides off her shoulders, and the feeling of it slipping down her back makes her jump. It only takes half a second for her mind to register that she’s not under threat, but the quivering of her body lingers. It lingers as Joel bends to retrieve the coat with a pained grunt; it remains as he drapes it back over her shoulders once more, the fur lining tickling the flushed skin of her cheek. Ellie grips her backpack and blade in each hand as she slides the other through its respective sleeve, then slips her pack onto her shoulders. The weight of it on her back feels familiar. It feels grounding.

It's then that she remembers who they’re running from.

Joel stares, unspoken words hanging in the air between them. You okay?

She switches open her blade and nods.

When Joel turns back around and beckons her to his side, she spots the hunting knife sheathed at his back. She grabs it as she sidles up to him, sliding under his arm. The wind whistles and Joel watches as Ellie stuffs the larger blade into his free hand. A moment later, as if his body is on a delay, his fingers curl around the handle. She sniffs as they meet each other’s gaze; her nose won’t stop running.

“I think they’re gonna come after us,” she says, unblinking.

Joel turns ashen. He tugs her in tighter. And they move forward, knives pointed into the snow ahead.

-

Ellie spots the axe first.

It’s nearly hidden, lodged in the stump of a tree, the face of which is piled with snow. But its water-darkened wooden handle is pointed diagonally towards the sky, like a beacon. A small pile of chopped wood sits a couple of yards to the right. A litter of thatched, broken sticks surround it, as if someone had once tried to cover the wood pile with a lean-to. Now, all of it is lost to the elements, the wood soaked through with snow.

Still, there’s hope for the axe, Ellie thinks.

“Joel,” she murmurs, before breaking away from his side and crossing the small distance over to the stump. He follows close behind, coming to a stop behind her. A hand passes over the top of her head, brushing the collected snow away.

When she pockets her switchblade and reaches two hands out for the axe handle, Joel bats them away gently, shaking his head. “I got it.”

Ellie stares at him as he grips the handle, trying first to dislodge it with one arm, then with two. The axe budges but doesn’t fully come out. Grunting a little, she wraps her hands around his and they both pull. The force of the weapon shifting into their grip nearly sends them both toppling back into the snow, but they stumble into one another instead. Like two sides of a triangle, they hold each other up.

As soon as they find their footing, Ellie snatches the axe from Joel, shivers a little with the loss of body heat radiating from his side.

He doesn’t say anything about it—under normal circumstances, he probably wouldn’t let her take an axe for a weapon, though nothing about their circumstances is normal. In actuality, he doesn’t seem to be paying attention to Ellie at all. With a crease between his eyebrows, Joel stares down at the stump, then the pile of wood and the broken lean-to. He whips his head right, then left, then behind him, as if he’s expecting someone. It’s not unusual to see him looking puzzled, troubled, but usually she can figure out why. Whether it’s the fog coiling around in her mind or the cold and the fear freezing away any thoughts, Ellie can’t seem to clock what he’s thinking, and she can’t find the words to ask.

“C’mon kiddo,” he murmurs, eyes still on the surrounding woods. He pulls her into him by the crook of her elbow, brushing hand between her shoulder blades before moving them forward once again.

They walk up what feels like an endless, steady incline, where the thick pine trees clam together, become dense—where they must be woven through rather than walked beside. The landscape gets rockier, too. Large boulders begin to crop up more frequently in their path, snow-capped and twice their height. It can’t be more than a mile, but time feels as if it’s looping around and spiraling in on Ellie; it feels like she’s losing every moment, even though every moment stretches ceaselessly on.

With two tandem, heaving exhales, they crest the hill. A bit beyond the base, maybe two hundred yards away, a squat condominium complex sits, as if waiting for them. The sight stops Ellie in her tracks. It has an unreal quality to it, appearing to exist entirely alone in its surroundings. There’s no visible parking lot—or even a road. They must be hidden behind the building, leading further west.

The condos are practical, with tan composite siding and plain white windows. Some are broken, and dirty green curtains spill outside, billowing in the wind and catching the snow. Icicles hang, sharp and menacing, from the overhang of the flat roof. There’s a small sign adorning the smaller roof overhanging the front door, but it’s too far away for Ellie to make out the name.

She points with her axe hand, entirely unnecessarily, since the building is right fucking there where they can both see it. She only manages to tear her eyes from it when she doesn’t hear a response from Joel. He’s staring at the condos, too, that wary expression still etched into the lines of his face.

“Joel,” she tries again, tugging on his sleeve.

After another moment, he looks down at her and seems to remember himself. He nods, then nods three more times.

“Yeah,” he says.

“We can stay there?”

“Yeah.”

“Safe?”

Joel sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve. He hesitates. “Yeah. Should be.”

Nothing about his tone makes the fear settle. Terror continues to thrum through Ellie’s body like a live wire. Her throat feels raw, still singed by lingering smoke. She coughs into the crook of her elbow, into the fabric of Joel’s coat. She nods.

About halfway down the hill, though, their path is entirely blocked by an enormous rock structure. Two opposing formations almost entirely block their path. They’re too high to climb over—though neither of them could probably handle climbing anyway—and they stretch far into the woods, lost in fog and dense thickets. Attempting to go around is too risky; they might be walking forever trying to find the end of them.

Their only shot is just off to their left: a small, craggy gap between the rocks, not even two feet wide. Between the falling snow and the darkness of the thin space, it’s hard to know what they’re seeing. Still, from their bird’s eye view, it looks like a ten-foot stretch through to the other side. A ten-foot squeeze and they’ll be safe for the night. Ellie has to believe it, or else every bit of fight she’s mustered up to stay the fuck alive is for nothing.

“We can fit,” Joel assures, even though she hasn’t said anything.

Ellie nods.

“Almost there, kiddo.”

They shuffle down the hill, the promise of shelter guiding their footsteps with a renewed push of energy. But the rock formation feels much taller when they’re standing directly ahead of it; the stone is uneven, jarred outward in some places and concave in others. The path is more meandering than it originally looked. They can’t see through to the other side.

When Joel exhales shakily, a cloud of breath forms, then dissipates, into the air. Feeling the cold suddenly now more than ever, Ellie burrows further into his side. For another moment, they both just stare into the faces of these two rocks—then, he glances down at her.

“You stay here,” he says. “You let me go first.”

The moment Ellie begins to shake her head, Joel starts nodding his back at her.

“Yes, Ellie.”

“No.”

When he pulls his arm away from her shoulder and steps forward, she snatches the sleeve of his jacket. (The thin one, the only one he has now that his winter coat is bundled around her. If Ellie thinks about it too long, the guilt and the shame and the something-like-love threatens to eat her alive).

“I’m right behind you,” she says, and tries to ignore the way her voice shakes its way around the words—the way her entire body trembles around them.

Joel stares back at her, stricken with something Ellie can’t quite put a finger on.

What he doesn’t understand is that she’s not insisting on following him out of some need to be a hero—or, like, a grown-up. Ellie needs to follow him, needs to keep one hand on him and the other on her axe because she’s terrified. Terrified, like through her skin and into her muscles and around her bones.

And though she feels the pain of her body—the hits to her head and the strangulation bruises and the boot-shaped blows to her abdomen—it all settles somewhere just below the fear. The abject horror creeps around in the back of her throat, like vomit, like words unsaid.

Finally, Joel relents: “Right behind me.”

Ellie sniffles, nods, and readjusts so she’s gripping the hem of his jacket instead. They start forward through the boulders.

It’s a slow, sideways shuffle. After a moment, it’s clear that keeping ahold of Joel is unrealistic with the way their bodies are squished and contorted by the rocks, so Ellie lets go and forces herself to breathe through the way it feels like some essential tether between them has been slashed in two. As if they’ve become the rock structures through which they walk—close, but never touching. She can still feel the last lingering bit of warmth his body heat gives off, though, and she clings to it, tries to seal it between the panels of her heart, a secret just for her.

At first, they seem to make a gentle curve to the right. Then, a few feet through, the path juts sharply to the left. As they round the corner, Joel gasps, and an awful screech cuts through the quiet din of the surrounding storm. Though Ellie can’t see anything beyond the expanse of Joel’s body, she knows that sound anywhere. The Infected must have been growing against the rock’s walls, waiting—the way they tend to do in these colder temperatures.

For a long moment, everything is a flurry of movement and sound and body parts. Joel’s left hand is thrown back into Ellie, making blind attempts to push her back. The heel of his palm butts into the side of her ribs, nearly hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She shuffles backwards, tripping over her own feet. When she catches a glimpse of blackened, shriveled fingers scrabbling for purchase on Joel’s body, Ellie barks out a loud whine.

Quicker than she can blink, though, the eerie yowls of the stalker are suddenly overshadowed by the loud squelch of blade sinking through flesh. And again, and again, until yells turn to growls and growls turn into thick silence.

Ellie stares down at the tiny sliver of open space between Joel and the rocks, at the twisted, crumpled body of the Infected.

“Hey.”

Joel’s hand is on her cheek, the pad of his thumb pressed against the corner of her nose. When she comes back into her body again, Ellie realizes that the shivering has meandered into convulsions, that the twin tear tracks down her cheeks have already gone cold.

She grips the cuff of his sleeve. She wants to ask if he’s okay, but all that comes out is a weak, “You?”

“It didn’t get me.”

Sniffling, Ellie lets out a shaky sigh.

“Did I get you?” He nods to her ribs, where she can still feel the dull ache of his palm against her bruises.

Ellie shakes her head, tries to look down at her feet but catches her forehead on the ragged rocks instead.

“I did; I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I’ll take a look once we’re inside, okay?”

Inside. They need to get inside. The sky has been dull all day, but now, looking up through the needles of the thick fir trees, it’s actually getting dark. They won’t last the night out here in this storm; as it is, it’s going to take a miracle to get them out of Colorado alive.

To make their way out from between the rocks, Joel and Ellie have to walk atop the Infected’s corpse; there’s nowhere else to go. The soles of her boots dig into taut flesh and bone. When she gets to its hip, the bone shatters underneath her weight, and she has to scrabble for purchase on the slick rocks in front of her.

A keening breath escapes her, and Joel murmurs gruffly: “Almost there. Almost there, baby.”

A couple more feet, and he’s tumbling out into the open air, quickly turning back to stretch his hand into the stone crevice. Ellie puts her palm in his, and he tugs her the rest of the way, her cheek crushing into the side of his chest.

Up ahead, the condominiums await them with piling snowdrifts and a lingering air of unreality. It’s much too good to be true, and still, Ellie can’t help but think she deserves a gift like this—shelter, where shelter has no right to be. Joel’s arm tightens around her back. They continue forward.

As they approach the building, it’s the sign coming into focus beyond the falling snow that makes her inhale a sharp, ragged breath.

Right there, painted into burnished wood on the gable end of the porch roof: Silver Lake Condos.

“No,” she begs lowly. “No, we didn’t—”

Joel glances down at her, then follows her gaze. “Hey—”

“Do you think we made a circle?” Despite the frigid air, despite her trembling, Ellie feels panic lance heat across her cheeks, her forehead. She stares up at Joel, eyes wide. “Did we just walk in a circle?”

Mouth set in a grim line, Joel shakes his head roughly. “No—kid—listen.”

“Joel—”

“The sun, Ellie.”

She stares at him blankly.

“Look at the sun,” he repeats. The sun isn’t actually visible anymore, but there’s a lingering light ahead of them, just beyond the condos. “It’s stayed ahead of us the whole time we’ve been walkin’. West, the whole time.”

“The town—it goes this far?” Ellie glances behind her, still half expecting to find them surrounded.

“Getting into the outskirts now, reckon. Besides, I—”

Joel cuts himself off, closing his mouth with a small, sharp shake of his head. The panic begins to tickle the tips of Ellie’s fingers.

“What?” she demands. The voice that comes out of her is not one she recognizes: low, dark, and—somehow—strong. Unwavering.

“Baby—”

“No,” she snaps. “Something’s wrong.”

“I…” He sighs, jutting his head in the direction they came. “The wood. And the axe, the Infected. I’m worried we’re in an abandoned settlement.”

The admission runs through Ellie like ice.

“Not abandoned,” he clarifies, face pinched. “I guess. Turned.”

Slowly, the two shift their focus to the building ahead. No sound spills out from its broken windows, through the walls. Still, Infected can be quiet when they want to be.

He leads them over to one of the windows to the right of the front doors, its glass still half-ragged in the pane. They crouch in the snow beds beneath, and Joel motions for her to stay down. Slowly, he creeps up to peer into the building.

Snow wetting the backsides of her jeans, Ellie watches his eyes as they track back and forth, sweeping whatever he sees inside. She knows they’re fucked when his next breath stutters in his chest.

Joel crouches back down. “Couple runners in the lobby that I can see.”

Ellie nods, willing herself to put on a brave face. She wishes she could just sink into the snow beneath her. All that fighting to stay upright, stay alive, and all she wants is to lay down and die. If she thought Joel would ever let her, she’d do it in a heartbeat.

But the fear supersedes everything—the pain and the apathy and the feeling of someone else’s footsteps stomping through her brain. The fear keeps her alive.

“There might be more,” he continues. “I won’t know until I get in there.”

“We,” she clarifies.

“No.”

“Joel,” Ellie says, like, are you insane? He might be.

When he replies, his voice is rough. “You ain’t fighting. Not in your state.”

“My state is your state.” She drops her axe in the snow and shoves him, coat-covered palms to his chest, but he doesn’t go anywhere. It probably hurts her more than it hurts him.

“You stay here,” Joel says, like it’s final.

Fuck that. “You can’t make me.”

If there’s one thing Ellie’s learned from being locked in a cage and pinned down beneath a man with human meat on his breath and his violent heart thumping on top of her, it’s that she’s never going to let a man make her do anything ever again. Not even Joel.

And it’s true; he can’t stop her. When he realizes this, his shoulders slump forward, forehead banging once against his crouched knee. After a moment, he picks his head back up and stares at her, trying for stern but ending up somewhere around grief.

“You stick to me,” he finally says.

Ellie nods.

“I mean it. Like glue, kiddo.”

She nods again. With bright red knuckles set against bone-white fingers, she picks up the axe from its place sunken beneath the snow. Her—Joel’s—sleeve bunches over the handle; it messes with her grip.

“Can you—my sleeves?” she asks quietly, using her free hand to brush a bit of loose hair away from her face.

Something flashes, softens, in Joel’s gaze. He clears his throat, nods, and reaches for her. One at a time, with a quiet tenderness Ellie’s not sure she’s ever felt, he rolls up the sleeves of her—his—coat. When he’s done, he hesitates for a moment, then leans back in, doing up the zipper, too.

She doesn’t want to lose this, Ellie realizes. She doesn’t want to lose him. If a few Infected stand between her and life, between her and her—Joel—she’ll take them down, easy. She’s gone up against much worse, now.

“Better?” he asks.

Ellie nods.

“Good,” he breathes. “Let’s go.”

4

The weather in Jackson is crisp and windy when Ellie decides she’s going to burn her bite scars off.

Sun pours down on her from overhead, but it does nothing to mitigate the way gusts of cold air whip clean through her sweatshirt. She fought Joel about putting on a jacket this morning; he was shaking her ugly-ass puffy winter coat at her like she was a dog. You’ll freeze your goddamn ass off. And, before she could stop herself, she’d barked out a snarling, sarcastic yeah, okay, Dad, and flipped him off. Things devolved pretty rapidly after that.

Once she’d stormed out—and stopped by Jesse’s house so he could loan her his flannel-lined denim jacket—she found herself at the big barn, of all places.

Jackson has a few different barns, but the big barn, as it’s known colloquially, is where the cows and goats are housed. It’s one of the biggest structures in the community, built entirely by the residents in the early years of the settlement. Its near-constant need for patch-up jobs means it tends to resemble the structural equivalent of a hand-sewn quilt, but Ellie likes it. What Joel calls shoddy craftsmanship, she calls charm. (He tells Ellie she sounds just like Tess sometimes. It’s one of her most treasured compliments).

On early afternoons like these, the cows and the goats are out grazing in the yard, and some of the younger kids like to play in the barn while they have the opportunity. There’s at least six of them out right now, including Nicky, who, for the day, is under Ellie’s watch while Tommy and Maria are neck-deep in council meetings.

Nicky, at just nearly one and a half, is too young to really keep up with these kids—all in the K-3 group at school. Still, he tries, running behind them like a shadow on chubby, denim-clad legs. Every once in a while, he takes a tumble into the hay but it only makes him giggle like a maniac. Ellie watches, her spot in the grass giving her a view right into the barn’s side exit.

 “Ellie!” a little voice calls. It’s Moonee, Astrid’s granddaughter. Her white-blond hair is sticking up in every which direction as she perches alongside the other kids. They’re all hanging against the scuffed blue tube gate, pushing their faces into the long, horizontal gaps between the bars. Nicky’s got his arm hooked around Ranger Connor’s calf.

“Hey, Moon,” Ellie calls back.

“Can you please tell Nicky to please run faster?”

Ellie tilts her head, suppresses a grin. “He’s only little, he doesn’t know how.”

Extricating his leg from Nicky’s grip, Ranger pushes the soles of his shoes onto the second-highest rung of the fence, leaning over the side towards Ellie. “But we’re going to play clickers and hunters!”

“You guys better come out into the yard and play that; there isn’t enough room in the big barn.”

Several tiny groans erupt from the fence, plus a high-pitched laugh from Nicky.

Ellie looks pointedly down at the open journal in her lap, adopting a teasing lilt to her voice. “I’m gonna go get Margarita from the field and tell her to bite each and every one of you.”

Margarita is the biggest cow they have in Jackson; she’s spotted with brown and white fur and taller than Ellie by at least a few inches. At her words, the kids squeal and scramble up and over the fence. Nicky lifts one foot like he’s going to try, then thinks better of it and crawls through the gap at the bottom.

After much harrowing debate, the kids finally decide to let Moonee be hunter first because she’s the oldest. They all look at Nicky then, wondering what to do with him. Ellie says, “Nicky has an immunity necklace.”

“What’s immunity?” Mackenzie asks, the beads at the ends of her braids tinkling in the wind.

Ellie’s not even quite sure what the immunity necklace is. Joel told her about it like a year ago, something to do with a reality show where people tried to survive on a desert island. He’d laughed, nudged her with his socked foot from across the couch. Your immunity necklace came permanent, kiddo. It was back when he still thought he could say things like that, lighthearted jokes here and there about her immunity. As if the weight of what Ellie could have done with it didn’t hang over her every day. As if Joel didn’t lie straight through his teeth about why it didn’t work out. Still, somehow the concept stuck around in her brain. Immunity necklace.

“It means he can’t be hunted. He just gets to run around with y’all” She cringes at the y’all. Try as she might to hold on to the vestiges of her birthplace, she’s sounding more and more like a resident of Jackson every day.

Clickers and hunters is pretty much the same as a regular game of tag. One person is a hunter and the rest are clickers; if the hunter can tag a clicker, that clicker becomes the hunter, and so on. It can get a little violent sometimes—the kids tag each other by making a “gun” out of their first three fingers and jabbing them into each other’s sides.

Almost absent-mindedly, Ellie dips her hand beneath the sleeve of her sweatshirt, passing her fingertips across grooves and ridges and textures that have become familiar to her. It used to be comforting; when she and Joel were on the road, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d close her eyes and memorize the shape of her scars by touch alone. That was back when those scars had a purpose; when her bites were going to be the thing that saved the world. Now, when she touches them, all she can feel is that pressing weight, threatening to pin her down, drag her beneath the hard crust of the earth.

Everywhere, there’s something reminding Ellie that she didn’t fulfill her purpose. Derrick getting bit on patrol a few months ago—the way Maria had to usher his family outside the walls to say goodbye before his patrol partner took care of him. For every t-shirt she picked from the swap two weeks ago, Joel picked up a long sleeve to go with it. Right now, these kids—giggling and squealing as they play at killing infected. Playing at something they’ll soon enough become acquainted with in the real world.

It would be easier, Ellie thinks, if she had one less reminder. If she could get rid of the one that follows her wherever she goes, that lives on her skin.

The more she thinks about it, the hard part is deciding how to get rid of it. Cutting at it won’t ever hide the texture entirely—plus, Joel will never believe that she wasn’t trying to hurt herself hurt herself. She could burn it with the lighter they keep in the kitchen junk drawer, but it would take forever and hurt like a motherfucker on top of it. Still, something about the idea of a burn has an idea, or a memory, melding and forming somewhere in the back of her mind.

You won’t see many chemical burns in the field, Officer Ahmad had said. Field first-aid was Ellie’s least favorite class. She’d never admit it, but some of the photos in their textbooks made her squeamish. Mostly, when people get their hands on chemicals like that, they’re drinking them. But we have had the rare acid attack in the QZ, so it’s best to be prepared. Officer Ahmad should have tattooed that on his forehead for how often he said it. It’s best to be prepared.

A chemical burn. For a while, Ellie watches the kids, probes the skin of her bites with her thumb, and mulls the concept over. She turns it, inspects it in her mind, the same way she used to lift up rocks to find bugs. It’s going to hurt, probably as much as burning it with the lighter would. But it’ll be quick.

“Can you walk with us to the mess hall, please, Ellie?”

Ellie startles, snatching her hand from underneath her sleeve. The kids are gathered at her feet; Nicky comes ambling up to climb into her lap. “Is it lunchtime already?” she asks.

“It’s—” Moonee holds her wrist up, staring at the small, pink watch face resting there, “12:23.”

“Oh shit.”

The kids all giggle, and a few murmured shits pass through the group.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Ellie says, gathering Nicky properly in her arms before pushing to stand up. “This one’s supposed to be napping soon, anyway, I think. Come on, punks.” She nods her head in the direction of Main Street.

As they begin to meander down the well-trodden path, Nicky lays his head down on her shoulder and takes a bite of her sweatshirt collar into his mouth, sucking on the fabric.

Ellie exhales a laugh. “I love you, you know. Weirdo.”

“Love,” Nicky repeats, gleaming eight tiny teeth at her in a wide grin.

She fixes her face into something mischievous. “I have cheese sandwiches in my backpack. Don’t tell the others.”

“Cheese!”

“Yeah, don’t get too excited, babe. Your Uncle Joel made them—not exactly fine dining.”

-

The next afternoon, Ellie gives Joel a five-minute head start on his walk to the stables before heading over to the hardware store. He’s going to be gone on patrol until evening, and still, the window of time she has to do this is going to be shorter than she would prefer. But she’s beginning to lose her nerve, so it’s now or never.

Ethan Connor’s hardware store is a big, giant mess. It smells perpetually of sawdust because the backroom functions as a woodworking and carpentry studio. The shelves are cramped and hand-crafted, filled with lightbulbs and tools and everything home repair-y that doesn’t quite fit in with the swap a couple blocks down the street. It’s dim and dirty and for some reason Joel loves it; for once, all the times he’s dragged her through here will be of benefit. Ellie’s quite sure they have exactly what she’s looking for.

Standing behind a small workbench, Ethan’s polishing a lamp that looks like it came from the 17^th century with deep purple half-moons under his eyes, courtesy of his newborn son. Across the store, Madeline—one of the preschool teachers—is quietly immersed in untangling a giant mess of string lights. They both glance up, a bit startled, when the bell above the door jingles at Ellie’s arrival.

“Ellie!” Madeline chimes, at the same time Ethan says, “Hey, Ellie.”

“Hi,” she replies, digging the toe of her sneaker into the uneven wood.

One corner of Ethan’s mouth quirks up. “Miss Madeline here was just telling me that Ranger spent the morning teaching the other kids in his class ‘the s-word’.”

Ellie’s eyes flicker between him and Madeline, who’s hiding her own smile behind her ball of string lights. She’s pretty sure they’re joking with her, but sometimes parents in Jackson are total freaks about their kids using curse words, so it’s hard to tell.

“Uh—”

“Any idea where he could’ve picked that up?”

“The kids are actually real tight-lipped when it comes to snitching,” Madeline remarks, shrugging sweater-clad shoulders.

“Well,” Ellie hedges, “it is the end of the world. That’s not a bad lesson to learn.”

They both laugh and nod, and she picks at a spare thread on her jeans, sighing into the stuffy air.

“You looking for something in particular?” Ethan asks.

“Um…” Ellie casts her eyes around the room, searching for anything that might get the job done. She spots it on a tall shelf, stashed with other household cleaners and paints and varnishes. Drano, the bottle reads, red plastic faded and scratched with time. Anything with bleach, Officer Ahmad had said.

“Just the Drano,” she says, pointing. And she finds that, once the lie begins, it unspools as easily as silk ribbon from her mouth. “Joel’s working on the master bathroom and the shower won’t drain.”

Ethan hums. “You helping him out?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” He nods, turning to the shelf with the Drano and reaching for it. “Keeping busy is good.”

“Yeah,” Ellie says again.

Ethan hands her the bottle, and she wraps an arm around it like someone might take it from her. A small, tingling anxiety begins to roam around inside her body at the thought of what she’s about to do to herself.

“And you—” Ethan interrupts her thoughts “—you’re doin’ alright? I mean, both of you?”

“Mm-hm.”

People in Jackson are in each other’s business at a level Ellie’s never experienced. Friendly, is what Maria calls it.

“It’s just, Joel mentioned—”

“Joel talked to you about me?” she barks, then immediately sticks her free thumbnail into her mouth as if she can pull the words back into her mouth. Her anxiety dims, swallowed instead by anger—at Joel, at Ethan, at pretty much the whole world.

Ethan holds his hands up, palms out. “I really shouldn’t pry, I’m sorry.”

Ellie shrugs, not trusting herself to say any more. Joel’s always harping on her about thinking before she speaks and if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. It sucks, but it’s bringing her physical altercation average down in spades.

“I think he’s just worried that you aren’t happy here,” says Ethan.

She raises her eyebrows, unable to stop her irritation from worming its way into her tone. “It’s a little late to start worrying; it’s been over a year since we showed up.”

“Well, you know Joel.”

“Right.” Ellie has her thumbnail in between her teeth again, garbling her words. For better or for worse. “I know Joel.”

Ethan stares at her, clearly waiting for her to say more. She settles on:

“I’m fine. I like Jackson. It’s safe.”

“It takes a while to adjust,” Madeline says suddenly, looking up from her tangle of lights. When Ellie turns to her, dubious, she smiles softly. “It really does. Happy is a lot harder than safe.”

Happy is a lot harder than safe. Ellie feels the words cover her, reaching toward the darkest, dustiest crevices of her heart. They burn in the corners of her eyes.

“Yeah,” she breathes, shaken. “Um, well, I gotta go. Thanks, for…” Ellie holds up the Draino bottle awkwardly, then turns and ducks out of the store.

-

Her hands won’t stop trembling. Her whole body, really.

Ellie has her forearms braced against the big, white utility sink in Joel’s garage. He’s going to be home soon, and she’s hoping that her absence from the house won’t worry him enough to go looking for her. She has everything she needs here; by the time she’s back later tonight, he won’t suspect a thing.

The Drano sits unopened in the deep basin, out of the way of the running faucet. Her ears feel full, like she’s underwater. The fabric of her sweatshirt, scrunched up at the elbows, suddenly feels rough against her skin, as if her body knows what’s coming—as if it’s trying to tell her it can’t handle the pain.

“Well, fuck that,” Ellie whispers to herself. She clenches and unclenches her hands until the shaking is under control, then grabs the bottle, unscrewing the cap.

The sharp, chemical smell hits her nose almost instantly, and she rears back on instinct, holding the bottle away from her face. Though she feels cold, a balmy sweat begins to cling to her forehead.

Then, she sees her bite mark. The corrugated tendrils snaking underneath her skin and the dimples where multiple sets of teeth have sunk into the flesh.

Ellie wants it gone so badly. She wants it off of her more than she thinks she wants anything in the world, which is saying something because there’s a fucking lot she has to want for.

So, she plants her feet. She grips the Drano like it’s going to run away. And she pours.

The pain happens on a delay. For a moment, the gooey liquid runs down her forearm in thick planes and Ellie feels absolutely nothing. Then, all at once, the burning hits her nervous system like a boot to the gut. She cries out then almost immediately gags, vomiting into the sink’s basin. It’s like nothing she’s ever felt before; it hurts all over, threatening to tear through her from the inside. Even Colorado doesn’t put a dent in this.

Her skin goes from clammy to slick with sweat. The shivering doubles down, rocking her entire body in hard convulsions. Ellie tries to watch the way her skin sloughs off, the way it falls down the drain in gummy, pink masses, but her vision is graying out at the edges.

She thinks she might be screaming. She must be screaming, because—somewhere—someone yells something back at her. Marco Polo, like they used to play in the orphanage. A moment later, she hears the door opening, banging against the outside wall of the garage. Ellie whips her head around to face the intruder but her vision goes completely black, taking several seconds to clear. By the time she can see again, Joel’s right beside her, hands on her waist—keeping her upright.

“Kid—what—” he breathes. They both stare down at the mess of her forearm.

As if for the first time all over again, the smell—the sight—hits Ellie, and she vomits once more into the sink, resting her head into the sleeve of her good arm. The quaking doesn’t stop.

“Under the faucet,” Joel orders. When she doesn’t move: “Now, under the faucet.”

This time, he doesn’t wait for her. He grabs her at her wrist and her elbow—gingerly, despite his tone—and thrusts the wound under the running water.

Like the scrape of a match against a striker, the sensation reignites the pain tenfold, and Ellie doubles over in trembling sobs. Her lungs contract and pinch, as if they’re refusing to give her any more air.

“You’re okay, you’re—goddamn it, Ellie, what the hell?”

“Joel.” She’s blubbering, tripping over words that she can’t form around the pain. Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t hate me.

He must understand anyway, because he takes one arm and holds it across her waist, tugging her back into his front, giving her something to lean against. His other arm continues to hold hers under the faucet; the fabric of his coat is now soaking wet where it meets the back of her forearm. Ellie shivers and shakes against him, tears and snot running freely down her face and neck as she watches and hurts and clasps the edge of the sink with a white-knuckled grip.

Still, amidst the worst of it, Ellie searches herself for regret and comes up empty. The bites are gone; the evidence of it is right in front of her. No more long sleeves, no more explanations. One less thing to remind her of how much she failed. How much he failed her.

“—you hear me? Ellie?” Joel’s voice cuts through the dull roaring in her ears.

The water’s been turned off and there’s a clean stretch of fabric wrapped around her arm. Ellie tries to turn around, to look up at him, but the movement makes her head spin. Knocking back into the sink, she blinks rapidly, trying to clear her vision. She still feels sick, gagging around nothing. Joel grips her shoulders, tugging her forward.

“Listen—you listenin’?”

She nods, digging her uninjured arm into her stomach and pressing down hard in a futile attempt to quit the shaking.

Joel’s shrugging his coat off as he says, “We’re going to the clinic.”

Ellie gags a little again, feels the burning of bile against the back of her tongue. She shakes her head viciously as Joel tugs his coat around her shoulders. She shrugs her good arm through its sleeve.

“Don’t—they’re—” Her voice is a ragged, hushed thing, clawing its way out of her before dissipating into the air.

Joel shakes his head back at her. “They ain’t gonna think anything. You—” his voice wavers, “—you got it all. It’s gone.”

Sighing, Ellie butts her head into the expanse of his chest. It’s then—amidst the relief—that her legs give out on her. Her burned forearm brushes against Joel’s side as she goes down, and she cries out again. His reflexes kick in before her knees reach the floor, though, and he hauls her back up into him.

“Alright, okay,” he murmurs. “C’mere.”

It’s a testament to how much she fucking hurts that Ellie obliges, curling her good arm around his neck when he leans down to get his other arm under her knees. As Joel hoists her up, she curls her hurt arm into her chest. As soon as she’s settled, he’s already out the door.

Rushing through the blue wash of evening, Joel’s murmuring things to her, most of which she can’t puzzle out among the pain. Still, one thing fights its way through the fog:

“It’s okay, baby girl.”

It’s words she’s only heard once before. It’s safety. It’s home base. Ellie lets herself become lost in it. She leans her head against his shoulder and gives in to the feeling of being yanked backwards out of consciousness.

5

It’s weird that Ellie and Joel share a backyard when they don’t even share a home anymore.

He used to sit on that back porch sometimes. Most nights when it was warm, even some nights when it was cold. When he needed the space of ten thousand stars above his head.

Ellie expected to run into Joel more often than she does. It’s not like she went far. Every scenario she ran through in her mind took place in the small spread of never-green Indiana bluegrass that made up the final piece of the world they still shared.

The first night she slept in the garage, Ellie crept over to the window that looked out onto the back porch. She sat on the fading yellow carpet that Joel found for her at the swap. (She would have never picked out a carpet for herself, and Joel found her two). Ellie sat, and she hooked her chin onto the painted white windowsill. Joel’s house stood resolute; the light next to the sliding glass door cast a dandelion glow onto the deckled wood. Two chairs flanked a small, circular table. Both of them sat empty.

It's been three months, and still—out of some strange, idiotic emotion she can’t put a name to—Ellie watches for him out that window. Sometimes it’s just a glance through the crack in her curtains before bed. Sometimes, she sits for a while, as she did that first night. Every night she watches, and every night the porch stays vacant. The emptiness trails through her like a slow poison, feeling something like abandonment, which is silly since she’s the one who begged to leave.

And while the fissure between Ellie and Joel grows wider as winter digs its heels into the Teton Valley, the chance that they’ll run into one another in the backyard, on the back porch, seems less and less realistic. It’s a relief, if she’s being honest with herself. The idea of being near him—with no one else around to help hold up their baggage—makes her heart crawl into her throat.

So, as Ellie leaves the party at the old inn, where her friends are all too wasted to realize she’s gone home early, she doesn’t expect to run into Joel at all. She’s a little drunk, a little sad, and the frigid night breeze doesn’t give a shit about her flannel. Goosebumps roll down her body as she unlocks the fence gate; once she closes the door, she crosses her arms and ignores the small shivers that begin to plague her.

“Only December…already snow in my boots,” she mumbles to herself, trudging across the backyard. Every exhale leaves her mouth in little clouds of air, all watery gray against the black night.

The light fixture that hangs beside the front door of her garage is warmer than the one on Joel’s back porch. Under its light, the snow glows tangerine. Inside, her little home is cold and empty, and there’s no fucking food in the cupboard. Ellie doesn’t want to go in there; she makes it all the way to the door, hand reaching out for the knob, before her bottom lip pushes out and she rears back. When she sits down into the snow, she realizes she likes the way the cold seeps through her clothes and her skin, all the way down to her bones.

So, she lays back, and the stars twinkle overhead, looking smaller and further away than Ellie’s ever seen them. The first snowflake that falls goes slowly, whirling through the air in unpracticed swoops and arcs before it finally lands somewhere above her head. The rest come quickly after that, falling into Ellie’s hair and onto her face and into the dips in the fabric of her clothes. Maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s incoming hypothermia, but she doesn’t really feel the brunt of the cold, even as she shakes there in the snow. Either way, she welcomes the numbing of her senses, the dull slog of her thoughts as they come to a halt. Just her and the stars above and the ground below. It’s easy to forget she’s not the only person in the world. It’s easy to forget that anyone—someone—could see her. Anyone—someone—could care.

“Hey.”

She opens her eyes. (She doesn’t remember closing them). Joel’s face looms upside down from above, his feet at her head. His pajamas hang loose and disheveled, the hems of his flannel pants haphazardly stuffed into his boots. One side of his coat is hanging down around his shoulder. He sounds out of breath.

“Joel?”

He breathes out a sigh of relief, puts a palm to his chest. His sweatshirt is one she’s never seen, almost-black green and a collar full of moth holes.

“Jesus.” His tone turns accusatory. “You look like a goddamn corpse out here. Thought you was dead.”

Ellie giggles a little (honest-to-God giggles—she can’t help it, the fucking moonshine). Joel frowns. Snowflakes are already beginning to catch in his hair, on his eyelashes and across the planes of his shoulders.

“Are you drunk?”

Now it’s her turn to sound accusatory. “No.”

“Ellie—”

“No, I’m not—I’m…”

As she trails off, silence covers them like a heavy blanket, thick and suffocating. Joel was always better than her at playing this game, but this time he speaks first:

“You really can’t be in the snow like this. It’s December.”

Ellie smiles, small and sad and a little sardonic. “Well, luckily I can do whatever I want.”

“Sure,” he bites back. “If you want, you can lay out here and die.”

There’s a venom thrumming through his words that she’s never heard before. Joel’s snapped, ignored, and yelled more times than Ellie can count, but he’s never been quite so mean. It rubs her the wrong way, scathes her—the idea that he can be just as angry at her for their estrangement as she is at him. He doesn’t have the right to be mad about it like she does.

Ellie wants to scream at him. All that comes out is, “Okay.”

Again, the silence, its stillness broken only by the way Joel worries his hands, messes with his fingers.

“Is something wrong?” he finally asks. The words sound awkward, as if they scratched on their way up his throat.

Ellie focuses her gaze on the stars instead of him. “No. Everything’s fine, clearly.”

“Can I sit?”

“We’re commies, aren’t we?” She shrugs, and the motion pushes snow up around her shoulders. “It may not be a free country, but at least it’s a free backyard.”

Joel seems to read that as assent, taking a couple steps forward to sit beside her, hip to hip. When he settles, Ellie sits up. In her peripheral vision, she can see the snowflakes caught in the strands of hair that hang down around her face. She wore it down tonight for reasons she can’t explain and have absolutely nothing to do at all with a girl named Cat. It doesn’t feel much like her, though.

She hooks her arms around her knees and hunches over, pushing her mouth into her wet jeans.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” Joel says.

“Good.”

“But you do have to go inside.”

Ellie purses her lips. Her hands begin to shake, and she can’t tell if it’s the cold or if it’s the way her chest feels like it’s collapsing and reforming with every breath.

“No,” she says.

Sighing, Joel begins to remove his coat. Ellie doesn’t say anything, but she finds her body leaning away from him on instinct. She finds herself gripping her muscles tighter, trying to will away the trembling. Joel either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. When he reaches out toward her with the coat, she shakes her head, murmurs an unh-uh.

Joel shakes his head right back at her, draping the coat over her back anyway. Ellie thinks about just shrugging it off, but that feels too dramatic; that feels like she cares too much.

“Sorry,” he says, voice quiet. “You not dying right now is more important than you hatin’ me.”

For some reason, that makes her eyes burn and her lip go down again. Almost immediately, Joel’s face falls, apologetic. He looks forward, at her door of her garage.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

Ellie shakes her head and shoves her mouth into her sleeve, looking away from him.

“I…” he begins, then looks down at his lap, going quiet.

Something—some odd mix of shame and embarrassment and grief—threatens to topple her completely, so she decides to choose the kinder course of action. It’s something she doesn’t choose often these days, especially with him.

“I’ll go back inside,” she promises. “I just wanted to look at the stars.”

It’s almost true.

Slowly, as if he’s mulling it over, Joel nods. “Well, I understand that, I suppose.”

Ellie sniffs and brings her palm up to swipe at the leaking corners of her eyes. In her head, it’s surreptitious, but some piece of her that’s more sober than the rest tells her it’s not. Some other piece of her, the one that remains stubbornly spongy and soft and small for Joel, cries out, waiting to be heard. Maybe it’s the liquor, but Ellie decides to let it speak.

“You can play guitar back there, you know,” she says thickly, nodding in the direction of his house. “If you want.” After a pause: “You did before.”

When she hazards a quick glance over at him, the tips of Joel’s ears are tinted pink, like he’s been found out. He avoids her gaze.

“Okay.” His voice is hoarse, cracking. He looks down.

“I guess it would be nice to hear it again sometimes,” she says.

And then she darts to her feet, shedding his coat as she stands. In hurried, heavy steps, she rushes to her door and closes it behind her without looking back.

+1

When dirt gets wet, it tends to stick.

Rain poured down on Jackson Valley last night, falling in harmonious whispers from the pine trees and dripping into the divots and cracks of the streets. Joel’s newly filled grave is very nearly muddy, his headstone turned a dark gunmetal.

Joel Miller. Over and over, Ellie reads the etching on the slate, but no version of belief is carried through her at the sight. She knows, objectively, that it’s him, buried beneath the earth below her. Where her knees dig into the soil, Joel’s only a few feet further down. Still, it’s incomprehensible that she won’t run into him later, awkward nods exchanged in the mess hall line and soft heys murmured across their backyard. She can’t shake the feeling that he’s not gone, not really.

It's hard to feel anything about Joel’s death other than the overwhelming sensation that there’s a gaping hole in the middle of her chest, a yawning chasm where her sternum meets her stomach. The wind—every emotion—it all passes right through her. Shakes her.

She tries hard to forget the way he opened his eyes when he heard her voice in that basement. She tries to forget the way blood ran rivers through the grooves and nooks of his face. The chip in his ear. The hair slicked to his forehead with sweat. A face she’s only known for five years, and now, in the wake of—this—it’s nowhere near enough. And flashes of him, broken, bloody, and bruised, come to her in waves. They double her over, these visions—the last memory she’ll ever have of Joel. Her Joel.

It's not just his face, either. Joel is everywhere, even in the places Ellie tried so hard to push him out of. He’s in the pull loops of her hiking boots, homemade and hand-stitched when she was sixteen so they’d last her another few years. He’s in the Nirvana record perched on her desk, found with a whole batch of others the first time he patrolled through that music store. He’s in her skin, in the burn on her palm that she got baking sweetbread—in the way he held her wrist under the cold faucet and wiped her snot and kissed her hairline. There’s nowhere Ellie can go that’s unmarred by him, by all the things he did for their town. The regabled roofs and oiled door hinges and the entire fucking new preschool building—traces of him still exist in the smallest, most unexpected pockets. Like he’s still here, kind of. And the fact that he will never be here again, not really, is agonizing. It’s everything. Ellie can’t move past it, can’t stretch her mind beyond it—the grief. It’s all she is.

“Hey.”

Ellie turns. It twinges a small muscle in her neck. Tommy stands above her, under the misty sky. His shoulders are slumped, hunched, as if the weight of his own existence is hardly bearable. She knows, because it’s a posture she recognizes in herself.

In his hands, a thick bundle of fabric. Toffee brown suede, four big, dark buttons. It’s not the one Joel was wearing when he died; this coat is a little older, one he didn’t take out of his closet much anymore. It’s the one she saw as they trekked through half of Nebraska and a little bit of South Dakota and all the way through to Cody. It’s the coat he wore when she loved him best, before distance and lies and the whole ugly rest of it drove them apart.

“I…” Tommy rubs the pads of his fingers against his mouth. His eyebrows pinch together. “Thought you’d want to have this, honey.”

Almost immediately, Ellie feels her throat ache and her eyes burn. She turns away from him and shoves the heels of her hands into her eyes. The next breath makes her whole body tremble.

“T—” she tries, but her voice hitches, and she shakes her head. She does want the coat; she also can’t really bear to look at it. Reconciling these two truths in her mind seems insurmountable, so she just cries, swiping each tear away as it comes.

Ellie hears him step closer, hears the rustle of fabric before the coat is draped over her shoulders. The weight of it, once something that made her feel invincible—or, at least, brave—now cements her to the ground. A statue, a scarecrow, a girl.

It doesn’t quiet her shivers, not like it used to.

“Honey,” Tommy murmurs. He’s on one knee beside her, leaning his weight back onto his heel. “Why don’t you come on home, now. Come have dinner with Maria ‘n I.”

She says nothing. She shakes her head. The wind whips her hair around, whistling its agreement. After a moment, Tommy nods, ghosting his hand across the back of her head before standing and exiting the graveyard.

Ellie brushes the palms of her hands together. And though some of the dirt crumbles into the filled ground below her, it mostly lingers. These stubborn pieces of earth that cling to her skin and dig beneath her nails.

She has a feeling that they won’t ever wash away.