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Joel knows, when she goes down, that she’s not getting back up.
He is intimately familiar with this breed of exhaustion: the kind that comes after the adrenaline drops off, when the exhaustion kicks in, and the meat of your body turns limp and uncooperative. He watches in silence as she tries to haul herself upright. It's like watching a horse try to stand on a broken leg.
“Ellie,” he says.
“I can do it,” Ellie says thickly. “Shut up, I can—” She wobbles onto her knees, both palms braced on the snow, then crumples forward. Pushes up, falls. Struggles, then falls. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong. You’re tired.” Joel closes the distance between them, snow crunching underfoot. “You did good, you’re okay.”
He crouches with a grunt, knees clicking, and scoops her: one arm around her back and the other under her knees. Easy, like she weighs nothing at all.
“Stop talking to me like that,” Ellie croaks.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a fucking animal or something.”
Joel keeps his jacket swaddled around her shoulders as he draws her up. The added weight pulls on the stitches in his gut. He gets up onto his feet, takes a slow step forward, testing—and realizes, with a dizzying wave of relief, that the pain is bearable. This will work. Ellie is motionless in his arms like a broken doll, some small dead thing. Her matted hair smells bloody.
“Go to sleep,” Joel mutters. He hefts her higher, adjusting his grip.
“I’m not tired.”
“Ellie—”
“Fuck you, I can walk, put me down.”
Her voice is smoke-hoarse, raw from screaming. When she ducks her face into his shoulder Joel feels short lashes crush wetly against his neck. He can feel how damp she is all over, a mix of blood, snowmelt, and cold sweat. She’s clinging to him, trembling violently, like she wants to crawl under his skin.
“You wanna walk?”
Ellie shakes her head.
“Okay,” Joel says quietly, and starts walking.
*
Two miles downstream he kicks in the door of a single-storey cabin by the river—the sort of place he and Tommy, in another life, liked to dream idly about renting for a fishing trip. The front porch is up on stilts above the water, the rest of the house sitting firmly on the bank. It smells of dust and disuse and water damage. Joel finds the previous occupant by the gas tank out back.
He'll head out there again, he decides, once Ellie comes around, to investigate the fuel situation and pull a tarp over the bones. With any luck he can spare her the sight of another body and heat up enough water to wash the blood off her hands. She had slept solidly the whole way here, even when he’d slipped on the wet porch steps; her warm breath tickling his throat, small hands leaving bloody clutch-marks on his shirt collar. When Joel finally lays her out on the couch his arms are numb from the elbow down. He drags over the rug by the fireplace and sits heavily on it. Cushions rustle above him.
“We’re okay,” Joel says immediately. “You’re with me, go back to sleep.”
But even as he talks, Ellie starts to move, her dim outline barely visible in the gloom. She crawls to the couch’s edge.
“Joel?”
Joel turns his head to meet her gaze, or tries to. Only the whites of her eyes are visible. Joel is dimly surprised to realize that he recognizes the look on her face: startled, blown wide, bloodshot. Twenty years, and he still knows it. He doesn’t feel capable of unknowing it.
“Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “Yeah, I’m here.” He swallows around the lump in his throat. “Just a dream.”
Ellie’s face crumples.
“Joel,” she croaks. One bloody hand reaches out and latches, claw-like, to his shoulder, the closest place she can reach.
Something has shifted. Something has changed, in him and in Ellie, between him and Ellie, some vitally indescribable thing; he doesn’t know how to reverse it, but he knows that if someone were to enter this room right now and take him from Ellie, or Ellie from Joel, the separation would leave a wound behind. Dually inflicted, internecine. It would gut them more effectively than any bullet ever could.
Joel is on the couch before he even realizes he’s moving: lifting her bodily back into his orbit, feeling cruel and stupid for letting her leave it in the first place. Ellie's fingers clutch the front of his filthy shirt in a white-knuckled grip. She’s crying now, for real: huge, guttural, full-body sobs, inconsolable, the way a baby cries. Whatever restraint she’d used to keep herself quiet in the forest is long gone.
“Okay, okay,” Joel murmurs, wrapping his arms around her. His mouth grazes her temple. “Okay, baby. You’re okay.”
Ellie’s body heaves so hard that he thinks she might vomit. Joel just sits and waits it out, eyes closed. He rocks them slowly, back and forth, ducking his nose into her matted hair and inhaling the familiar smell of her. It feels like a call-and-response between his panic and his senses: where the fuck is she? followed by, here, right here.
“I got snot on your shirt,” Ellie says, at last. Her voice is a raspy whisper.
“I’ve had worse on me,” Joel murmurs. Ellie makes no attempt to move. He makes no attempt to move her. Wind buffets the wooden shutters on the windows and Joel hopes, distantly, that it’s snowing. He hopes their tracks are gone by sunrise.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are we safe?”
“Yes,” Joel says, without hesitation, and hopes to God this is the truth. “Yeah, we’re safe.”
“Are you okay?”
Joel opens his mouth, then closes it again. Guilt hits his gut like a sucker punch.
“He gave me medicine for you.” Ellie swallows, hard. Her throat clicks. “Before they...”
“Who?” Joel demands.
“David.”
Joel files this name away for later use.
“He’s dead,” Ellie says, in a quiet little voice.
“Are you sure?”
“I mean, I smashed his fucking face in and left him in a burning building, so—”
Her tone and her words are mismatched with each other. It hits Joel, abruptly, how young she is—and how unfair it is, that everything good ended before she got to see it. That people continue to demand so much of her. A fourteen year old kid at the end of the world.
“I knew you’d come,” Ellie says thickly.
“Ellie,” Joel says. He’s fighting a losing battle to keep his throat clear. Ellie shakes her head again.
“Nobody’s ever come back for me except you,” she whispers. “Nobody, you’re the only one. The only—”
She hiccups. A little sound escapes her; small, involuntary, like she’s trying not to cry, and any vain hope Joel had of holding it together is gone, gone. He ducks his face roughly into Ellie’s hair again, hauling her closer—wondering, as he does, what the hell he’s gotten himself into, and wishing he could open a door to another time, another world. The list of things Joel would give her grows longer and more ludicrous by the second: hot water, hot food, her own bed with clean sheets. A school. A house. A dog. Hell, ten dogs. Why not? Ten dogs to rip the shit out of their imaginary carpets and piss off their imaginary neighbors, ten dogs to make Ellie grin her wild grin. He remembers Marlene’s warning, a lifetime ago, in that bloodstained hallway. Don’t fuck this up.
“Can we sleep here?”
Ellie’s voice is muffled by his chest. Joel isn’t sure if she means here, in the cabin, or here, burrowed into and around each other like a pair of alley cats. The answer is the same either way.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, tucking her head under his chin. “Yeah, you close your eyes.”
*
“It’s snowing,” Ellie says quietly.
Joel squints at the window, drowsy and half-blind. Thin slits of sunlight are pressing in between the shutters.
“It is?”
Ellie nods. Joel’s shirt rustles under her cheek. When he lifts her off him, her body goes stiff in his arms—and she reaches, viper-quick, to snatch a handful of his shirt in her fist.
“I’m not leavin’,” Joel murmurs. He takes her small hands in his and uncurls them from his sleeve—it’s no use. She latches onto him again anyway. “I ain’t leaving you, Ellie, I’m just going outside.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Joel tips his head down, looking her in the eye. Ellie stares back at him. The blood under her nose is the color of rust.
“All right,” Joel agrees.
They go outside.
When they reach the storage tank, Joel is relieved to find that fresh snow has hidden the bones from view. He sneaks glances at Ellie while he checks the fuel gauge; waiting for… something. Waiting for her to ask what the gas tank is, or what it’s for, or what the hell they’re doing here, anyway, in this crumbling little shack by the side of a river Joel doesn’t even know the name of, but Ellie doesn’t say anything. She just watches him, dark-eyed. Tommy clipped a deer once with Joel in the passenger seat, going 50 in a 40 on a backroad in June, and Joel remembers two things about that night with vivid clarity: the awful thud of the body glancing off the bumper, and the way the doe’s eyes had glittered in the headlights, black and glassine, before it bolted.
“‘Bout half a tank left,” Joel guesses. “Little less, maybe.”
He steps away from the fuel gauge with measured slowness, dusting snow off his hands. His body aches tenderly all over, like someone backed over it with an eighteen-wheeler.
“...Is that good?”
Joel’s never been so glad to hear a question in his life.
“Means the stove should work,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “We can boil some water, get you some clean clothes.”
“They took my clothes.”
“Yeah, well, I took them back. Your pack’s inside.”
Ellie’s throat works. She nods jerkily, scrubbing her eyes on her sleeve.
The gas stove in the kitchen is a yellowing relic left over from the '70s. Joel finds a BIC lighter tucked away in a drawer and flicks it under one of the burners, melting a pot of snow until it’s hot like bathwater to the touch. Ellie sits at the kitchen table and doesn’t flinch when Joel crouches to wash her face, not even when the dish cloth touches the raw skin under her nose. The blood scabbed on her forehead, Joel discovers, isn’t all hers. He rubs at it gently, cupping her face with his free hand.
“You hurt anywhere else?”
“They kicked me,” Ellie mutters.
“Kicked you where?”
Ellie lifts up her bloodstained sweater to reveal a livid bruise under her ribs, huge in size and dark in color.
“He tried to…” Her voice breaks mid-sentence. “He—and I didn’t—”
“Ellie,” Joel says, helpless.
“—And they were fucking eating people!”
“I know,” Joel croaks, “I know, I know,” and reaches to pull her into his arms.
Ellie, to his surprise, meets him halfway. She folds both arms around his neck without hesitation, shuffling closer to hide her face there. What to make of this, Joel does not know. He does know, but he doesn’t want to think about it. He wants Ellie to stop shaking so badly; he wants her to eat something, he wants to watch her sleep. He wants to resurrect the man she killed and kill him again, so she doesn’t have to live with it.
“I didn’t eat any of it,” Ellie whispers.
“I know.”
“I broke his fucking hand.”
“Good,” Joel says hoarsely. His throat feels thick and sore.
When she pulls away from him, Joel has to shut his eyes for a second: cool down, cool off, step back from himself. Ellie shrinks inwards, sinking into her chair, bringing her knees up to her chest and picking a loose thread on her filthy jeans. Clothes, Joel remembers suddenly. That’s a problem he can solve.
“Here.” He grabs Ellie’s backpack off the counter and hands it to her. “Get changed, I’ll look for something to eat.”
Ellie doesn’t move. She picks up the battered keychain dangling off the zipper instead, some cartoon thing with cat ears, rubbing her thumb over it.
“Thanks,” she mutters.
Joel nods. He turns around, ostensibly to inspect the kitchen cupboards—waits for the scrape of Ellie’s chair, the pad of her footsteps, the creak of floorboards out in the hall—then bows to rest his forehead on the nearest cupboard door, exhaling with his eyes closed.
What are you doing to me? he thinks dazedly. He feels punch-drunk, stupid and hopeless. What have I done? It’s reminiscent of the pain which used to hit him in the front seat of his car, pulled up by the bus stop at 6:30 in the morning; the terrible realization that a piece of him was walking around outside his body, out there in the world, with nothing to shield it.
Joel ransacks the kitchen, shelf by shelf, but finds nothing of note in it other than rat droppings in the long-dead fridge. He tries the faucet just for kicks and listens to the pipes gurgle emptily. He was expecting nothing, so the nothingness doesn’t disappoint him, but he’ll need to scrounge something up in the coming days before their low supplies run any lower. He doubts he could hunt while recovering from an infection and a gut wound, but maybe he could fish.
“‘Grown with care in the San Joaquin Valley’.” Ellie’s voice is slow and hoarse. “Where is that?”
“California.” Joel glances back over his shoulder, watching her lean tiredly against the doorframe. “Why?”
Ellie holds up the can in her hands. The peeling label reads, in all caps, PEACH SLICES IN LIGHT SYRUP.
“Found it under the boot rack,” she says.
There are no bowls in any of the stripped bare cupboards, and no silverware in the drawers other than a steak knife. They sit side by side on the mismatched kitchen chairs, elbows touching, and take it in turns to spear slices out the can. Joel remembers being paid in canned peaches a few times, back in Boston, before ration cards took over as the black market’s preferred currency. Tess always liked them more than him.
“So you ate these whenever? Like… whenever you wanted?”
“Pretty much.” Joel passes her the knife and adds, just to be a shit, “the fresh ones are better.”
“Fuck you, man,” Ellie says sleepily. Under the table, their knees knock together.