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“We can just be all poetic and shit and lose our minds together.”
Riley’s hand was warm. It was rough, her skin worn from years of writing by lamplight and pull-ups in the gym and rubble on rooftops. It was damp, too, sticky with blood that somehow felt fitting. It didn’t seem that far out, that this is the way they would go. People got bit all the time. People died all the time. But not her, and not Riley. Something like that, it didn’t happen to them, always someone else, someone unluckier.
Not this time.
Ellie wanted to get up and break things again. She wanted to punch her fist into the wall until it cracked and her blood spilled over her knuckles. She wanted to bleed until the bite on her arm went away. But Riley was holding her hand, and it was warm.
“What’s option three?” she asked, and she tried to ignore the fact that Riley was crying because Riley never cried unless things were bad. She’d barely cried talking about her parents. She’d barely cried on the nights when everything was all too much, the two of them in their dark room that belonged to the QZ just as much as they belonged to the QZ.
“I’m sorry,” Riley whispered, a tear dripping off of her chin. “I’m sorry.” She sucked a breath in like maybe it hurt.
Ellie felt her heart shatter.
Ignoring the tears pooling in her own eyes, she leaned sideways and tucked her head under Riley’s cheek, pressed her ear to her chest, and listened to the rhythm of her heart. Her dying heart. Riley pulled her closer, then wrapped an arm around Ellie’s head and cupped the back of her neck like she was afraid of losing her. Yeah, well fuck that. Ellie reached up, grabbed Riley’s arm, hid further into her, and then she let herself cry.
Her shoulders were shaking -- her whole body was shaking -- and Riley couldn’t hold her close enough. They tried countless times over the next hour, but they couldn’t get close enough. Ellie tucked her feet under Riley’s legs. Riley wrapped her arm harder around Ellie, pressed her lips into her hair and breathed in the smell of her. Ellie hadn’t stopped listening to Riley’s heart, memorizing the sound of every single beat. Eventually, she stopped crying. Eventually, she stopped feeling angry. In the end, all that was left was exhaustion. That and a gaping hole inside her chest.
“I think,” Riley started, then had to clear her throat. She’d been crying, too. Ellie shifted. “I think you snotted on my shirt.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the soft sound of Ellie’s laughter as she giggled into Riley’s chest. Riley, who was laughing, too. Who was smiling when Ellie pulled away enough to look at her. Riley, who was the most beautiful fucking person she’d ever seen. She was so beautiful that it made Ellie mad sometimes, because how could someone be so beautiful and be real?
“Hey, at least I didn’t snot in your hair,” she shot back, eyes following the curve of Riley’s round cheeks down to the smile that put dimples in them like kisses.
“Me?” she gasped. “I didn’t snot in your hair.”
“Uh, you totally did.”
“Did not!”
“Yeah, okay,” Ellie rolled her eyes with a smile. With a smile like everything was okay. Like this was still just a late-night, very against-the-rules date. Like they were going to wake up tomorrow morning and keep on living. Her smile began to fade. “I mean,” she murmured. “If you did, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t, huh?” Riley said, her own smile weaker, but there was a part of it still there, in her eyes. Her goddamn beautiful eyes, and Ellie thought, How often has she looked at me like this and I never even knew? How much of this did I miss because I was afraid? Because I thought I’d have forever?
“No,” she whispered, eyes flickering down to Riley’s lips. “I wouldn’t.”
Riley hummed, raising an eyebrow in a weak imitation of the teasing she’d do if things were okay. If they were still just a late-night, very against-the-rules date.
“Ellie,” she suddenly said, voice hushed. Ellie raised her eyebrows. “I… I kind of wish you’d kiss me again.”
Her eyebrows raised further. “Y-Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Riley breathed, closing her eyes.
Ellie felt like she was seeing stars. She felt like a whole galaxy was being created inside her chest, filling the hole that the last few hours had taken out of her.
“Okay,” she whispered, and then she was reaching up and laying her fingertips hesitantly against Riley’s cheek, thinking about how much softer this part of her was than her calloused hands, wondering, for a moment, what the other parts of her felt like; knowing with certainty that they were just as fucking wonderful.
Riley’s eyelids flickered open for just a moment before Ellie leaned forward and kissed her slowly. She’d never done anything like this before, and fuck it was scary, but it was pretty fucking great, too. She never wanted to stop. She wanted to do it a hundred more times. She would have said she wanted to do it until the day she died, but…
“I’m scared, Ellie,” Riley whispered, the skin between her eyebrows wrinkling.
“No, don’t say that,” Ellie replied, reaching up to brush the tears from her cheeks, run her thumbs along her smooth skin. “I’m supposed to be the scared one, remember? Like when we broke into that seven-eleven. Remember? I almost pissed my pants when that raccoon jumped out of the freezer.”
“Oh my god, you did,” Riley laughed, a desperate thing. “I swear I thought I was going to have to carry you out.”
“But I wasn’t really scared. I wasn’t scared because you were there, so I knew everything would be fine.”
Riley’s face crumpled. Ellie ran another sweep with her thumb, desperately trying to do the right thing to make her friend feel better because not much scared Ellie, but Riley looking like this did.
“Look where that got you,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“No.”
“You’re going to die because of me.”
“No!” Ellie shouted, shaking her head for good measure. “Don’t fucking say that, okay? This isn’t your fault. You hear me? This isn’t your fault.”
“I wanted to surprise you. I’m the one that brought you down here--”
“For the best fucking night of my life.” She looked Riley in the eyes, waited until she was sure she was listening. “Seriously, Riley. This was… the best fucking night of my life. And if this is the way I have to go out, then I’d say I got pretty lucky because I’m here with you instead of sitting all alone in some abandoned shithole with nothing left. Okay? So don’t say that it’s your fault because it’s not.”
Riley looked back at her, and then she smiled. It was more of a grimace but it was enough to remind Ellie to breathe.
“Okay,” she said, sliding a hand up Ellie’s arm, covering her hand with her own. “And, to be fair… I guess this was a pretty good last night alive, considering my options.”
“Right? I mean, I’m, like, way better than getting blown to pieces by anarchy bombs.”
“Shut up,” she grinned, rolling her eyes, and Ellie could have cried she was so happy. They were dying, but she was happy. She was scared shitless, more than she’d ever been in her whole life -- even the seven-eleven incident -- but she was happy.
Because there wasn’t anyone she’d rather go out with than Riley.
“All poetic and shit, right?” she said, sitting back and leaning onto Riley’s shoulder, flexing her fingers around the other girl’s hand. Riley traced a line down her arm, her thumb wiping away some of the blood that had dried around the bite.
“Right,” she whispered, looking up at her, eyes big and warm and alive.
They fell asleep an hour later. Riley’s head was resting on Ellie’s shoulders, their hands interlocked on her lap. And their dreams were lit by the lights of a carousel that never stopped, horses spinning and spinning, and a bottle of something strong passed between them; a perfect moment frozen in time.
Ellie was cold when she woke. She was cold, and her temple hurt from where she’d been leaning against the glass. She sucked a breath through her nose, dragging her head up and blinking her eyes open. She had a raging headache and her arm hurt like a bitch, but all things considered, she didn’t feel too bad. Not bad at all…
“Riley?” she said, voice hoarse. How long had she been asleep?
She looked around, wiping some hair out of her face. The mall was dark, but the lights were still on. The room seemed almost sleepy, with all of its strange decorations and glass shards scattered across the floor like confetti. And Riley was gone. Or, at least, she wasn’t here.
“Riley!” Ellie called, louder this time, and sat up.
She probably just had to piss or something, she told herself. And, sure, under any other, normal circumstance, Ellie would have let herself believe that. She would have gone back to sleep because a few extra hours of sleeping on a damn glass table was better than having to get up at the ass crack of dawn and run drills back at the QZ. Under any other, normal circumstance…
“We can just be all poetic and shit and lose our minds together.”
“Fuck,” she muttered, leaning forward so she could haphazardly drag herself to her feet.
“Riley, where--”
Ellie had smashed most of the glass counter, but she hadn’t smashed all of it. There, on what was left of it, sat Riley’s gun. Next to it was Ellie’s walkman, the cushions of her headphones fraying and dirty, the Etta James cassette still inside, half played.
‘And when I’m sad, you’re a clown
And when I get scared, you’re always around.’
It echoed in Ellie’s head, a distant memory -- one from a whole lifetime ago, not a few hours. It couldn’t have been just a few hours. They were so different, now. They’d grown up. Between the carousel and the kiss, and the blood that they’d spilled, Ellie and Riley had grown up. They weren’t kids anymore. She ran her thumb along the rubbery clown mask. Then, there, next to the Walkman, she noticed the pictures from earlier. The time machine. Fuck, she wished. If it really was a time machine, she’d go back and make it so that this had never happened. Just the bad parts, though. She wanted to hang onto the good ones. And, despite everything, there were enough good ones. Not a lot, but enough.
Like the image of them in the faded, black-and-white picture. It must have really been a time machine because the two people in the picture making scary monster faces seemed like they were from a whole other universe. They felt so far away. Ellie suddenly remembered that the pictures had been in her pocket. Riley must have taken them out while she was still asleep.
“Where are you?” she whispered, staring down at the picture. She slipped it back into her pocket.
A second later, she was whipping around at the sound of a rattling bang. She scrambled, grabbing Riley’s gun off of the counter and undoing the safety with shaking hands. Eyes wide, she whipped back around and pointed it in the direction of the sound.
“Riley?” she hissed, taking a step forward. Streamers covered the entrance to the store, and she couldn’t see past them to where the noise had come from. “Ri--” another rattle, like someone shaking a box of nails.
Ellie reached the streamers. With Riley’s gun in hand, she crept up to them, reaching out slowly. And then she threw them aside.
“Oh fuck,” she breathed, lowering the gun and laughing in relief. “There you are.”
Riley was standing on the other side of a door made of chains. It reminded Ellie of a cage, and she thought, what the deal with that? before thinking--
“Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing? Scared the shit out of me,” she cracked a grin, but Riley didn’t see it because she hadn’t turned around yet. Ellie glanced down, stepping around the rubble to get to the door. She grabbed it, fumbling for a moment before figuring out that it went up and not out.
“Next time you have to take a piss, wake me up first. I could’ve blown your head… off…” she stopped, the blood in her veins slowing to a crawl as she saw Riley jerk like something had bitten her. “Woah, are you okay? It can’t be starting already…” They had to have a few more hours at least.
She threw the door up and it went with a screech and a rattle. And then Riley whipped around. And it only took one look for Ellie to know that she’d been wrong. She’d known it already, somewhere deep in her subconscious; a part of her leftover in the wreckage had told her to be more careful otherwise she’d end up like this, with a runner lunging at her, its teeth bared. But there wasn’t any point in being careful when she was dying already, and that runner coming at her wasn’t just any runner, it was Riley.
Ellie yelled, a breath half-caught and raspy in her throat, and slammed the sliding metal door back down. It caught Riley’s arms, jerking her to the ground at the exact time the door closed with a clatter. Ellie fell backward. She tried to catch her breath. Her chest felt tight, and too many things were cramming their way into her mind, but all she could focus on was the pain. A horrible, impossible pain right in her chest, right in the center. Right where her heart sat as it was being ripped apart piece by piece. Ellie hadn’t known something could hurt this much.
And it hurt worse when, after a step back, and then another, and a sobbing breath, she realized what Riley had done. That everything she’d done had been for her; the gun on the table, leaving while Ellie was still asleep, putting a fucking cage between them. She’d known. The sudden clarity that she’d known she was about to turn hit Ellie like a fucking tank. It slammed the air out of her and almost brought her to her knees because she couldn’t do this alone. She couldn’t do this without her.
She didn’t even know what she was going to do.
“Way I see it, we got two options.”
Ellie looked into Riley’s eyes. They were bloodshot, covered in a milky, hollow film. She looked dead. But she was crying. There were tears curling down her cheeks, soaking into the sores and the rot that had started to form there, and Ellie wondered if they were still as soft as they’d been a few hours ago -- wished she could reach through the bars and find out. But Riley was growling and screaming like she was about to tear her throat to shreds and ramming herself into the bars of the door.
Ellie was crying, too.
“One, we take the easy way out.”
This wasn’t easy. Fuck, Riley, this was so much worse, and why wasn’t she turning, too?
“No… I don’t like option one.”
“What do I do?” Ellie whispered. Riley threw herself against the door again. “Riley, wh-- what do I do, just tell me what to do, please, please tell me what to do, I don’t--”
“Option two…”
Outside the store, Riley stilled, tilting her head, mouth open as she sniffed the air.
“We just keep going.”
“Please,” Ellie begged, tears streaming down her face, and she took a step closer like maybe that would turn things back to normal. “Riley… Please come back.”
For a moment, in her eyes, Ellie saw her. She saw the way they lit up when she smiled, or how the skin around them crinkled when she laughed, how they’d go all dark when she was passionate about something -- how they’d flashed wild and dangerous when she’d beat the shit out of Carol. How they’d looked right after she’d kissed her.
For a moment…
Then Riley slammed herself into the door, clawing through the bars, arms twisting as she tried to reach her. Ellie sobbed, and she felt her chest split clean in two, and she wondered how she was going to make it past this. She couldn’t. She couldn’t make it past this.
“What are you talking about, Riley? It’s over.”
“It will be… but not yet.”
It was over. It was over, and Ellie was alone. And she knew Riley had said she didn’t like option one, that she didn’t like the easy way out, but Ellie couldn’t look at her like this. She couldn’t stand by and watch her tear herself apart and turn into one of those things. And she thought, maybe, through the tears that were blurring her vision, that something in Riley’s eyes was telling her that she knew it. Had accepted it. Had prepared for this moment when she’d woken up and made the choice to let Ellie sleep, made the choice to leave Ellie on this side of the bars with the gun. Maybe it was because, even in the end, Riley had thought that Ellie was strong enough to do this.
And, really, it wasn’t the easy way out.
The fact that Ellie hadn’t begun to turn -- the fact that she should have, considering they’d been bitten at the same time -- would sink in later, after everything was over. And it would almost be scarier than the fact that she was completely alone. They’d been supposed to die together. It should have been poetic. That’s what Riley had said. That’s what Ellie had believed, the only reason she’d kept going, because if you got bit, you turned. That was how it worked.
How it was supposed to work…
Ellie raised the gun. Riley’s gun. It took her three tries, to aim it properly. By the third, she was crying so hard she could barely see. She wanted to beg Riley to come back to her, to stop it, to please don’t go because without you I don’t have anything left. She tried to say it with her eyes, just in case Riley was still in there.
“It’s okay,” Ellie suddenly said, deciding that, if Riely really was in there, she wanted the last thing she heard to be something good. “It’s okay. I’ll be okay. I’ll miss you,” her face twisted. “But I’ll be okay. Because -- Because I’m not giving this up. Okay? So you don’t have to worry. You can go, and I’ll be okay.”
She didn’t believe it, but she wanted Riley to.
A single gunshot rang out through the mall. Past the arcade, with the distant, echoing sound of laughter and boisterous yelling, so unashamedly loud. So free. Past the carousel, with its horses frozen in dead-eyed stares, forever marching, one after the other. For now, they’d march under glittering lights. Eventually, the lights would fade and the darkness would return, and they wouldn’t know any different. They’d just keep marching.
Out past the door and into the night, the sound of the shot would dissolve before it reached the sky, so small -- an insignificant moment in time, gone unnoticed by the soldiers waking up, getting dressed, doing their morning rounds. A single gunshot in an underground mall, a single shattering of two worlds, one which had to carry on without the other like a carousel horse without its glittering lights.
Ellie stared out into the aisle of the mall and let the tears drip down her face. She blinked, feeling a sickening sort of emptiness wash over her, settling deep and cold into her bones. Eventually, the tears slowed. Eventually, they stopped.
She left her Walkman on the counter next to the masks. The clown sat, toppled over and empty, staring over at the werewolf with its head lulled to the side. In a year from now, there’d be a layer of dust over them. In two, a boy would find Ellie’s Walkman. He’d wipe the dust off of it, lift the dirty headphones to one ear, and hit play, bringing to life a song that had been cut short two years prior.
‘Let them say we are wrong
I don’t care, with you I can’t go wrong…’
The lights would not work in the mall, two years from now, and the boy would never know that once, long ago, two girls had ridden the carousel and run up and down the escalator. Two years from now, he wouldn’t know how the masks still sitting on the counter had been worn to dance across the countertops. He would never know why all that glass covered the floor, or why there was a gun laying just inside the door. And, when he left, he wouldn’t think twice about stepping over the body in his way, wouldn’t stop long enough to notice how it was laid out nicely, its hands folded over its chest, a folded-up picture tucked between its palms.
And, two years from now, when Ellie sat on her bed in her own little home waiting for Joel to come by for their movie night, she’d think about that mall, and it wouldn’t be covered in dust. There would be no boy, or body, or gun. When she thought about the mall, it was always lit up. Even in her nightmares, the whole place was glowing.
Now, though, Ellie stood with a smoking gun, and she stared. And, when she lifted the metal door and slowly rolled Riley’s body onto its side, she didn’t feel a thing. She’d cried all her tears -- not forever, but for now. And when she pulled the picture from her pocket, she tucked it into Riley’s hands, because she wanted people to know. She wanted them to know that she’d been loved before she’d died. That she was still being loved, even after.
Riley’s cheeks were just as soft, and her hands, though bloody, were warm when Ellie folded them onto her chest. She held them for just a moment, and then she let go before they had the chance to grow cold. She only ever wanted to remember what they felt like when they were warm. Standing to her feet, Ellie wiped her hands down her face and took a deep breath, feeling, deep inside her chest, that she’d stepped over a line. She’d lost the child version of herself and had gained someone harder, someone colder. Ellie would never be able to get that child back. Riley would stay that child forever.
She sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and let out a deep breath. And then she looked at her for the last time, knowing that this was the moment she got to say goodbye. After this, all she had left of Riley was a ghost.
And Ellie thought, Don’t go.
And in a perfect world, Riley would have replied, Okay.