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Chapter Text

“You don’t understand anything! You’re just a stupid old man and you don’t know shit!”

Ellie storms out onto the front porch, slamming the screen door open and wishing it were heavy enough to cause actual damage when it crashes against the wall of the house. Her head feels hot and heavy despite the bite in the cold November air, her anger rising up through her body like a fount of magma.

“Don’t you walk away from me, young lady,” Joel’s voice comes from behind her, tense and tight. He’s not quite yelling but it’s close. “You get back in here and finish this discussion.”

She obeys simply for the satisfaction of slamming the screen door open again. She stalks back into the living room and stands facing him, hands on hips, mirroring his posture. His brow is dark and his mouth is an unfriendly line beneath his mustache.

“You know I’m capable! Why won’t you let me go?” she demands, a fierce ache clenching beneath her ribs.

“Because you’re fourteen years old,” he says, voice quieter but still hard. His forehead is furrowed, shoulders tight with leashed anger. “There are no special rules for you just because we went through some shit on the road. We live in Jackson now, and patrol starts at age sixteen, and that’s an end to it.”

“Yeah? Says who? What if I decided I don’t give a fuck and just went out by myself anyway? I could steal a horse easy,” she retorts, propping her weight on one hip and folding her arms. He immediately takes a step toward her, a flash of fear crossing his face as he reaches out as though to stop her.

“Don’t you dare. I catch you outside the gates by yourself and you’re grounded for six months,” he says, face shuttering again, voice a low growl, fists clenched at his sides.

“Oh, fuck off, you’re not my dad,” she says and immediately regrets it when she sees lines of pain tighten around his eyes, which he swiftly tries to hide. She tilts her chin up defiantly, aware she’s digging herself deeper into a hole but unable to stop herself.

“Maybe not, but when you live under my roof, you follow my rules, and it’s sixteen for patrol and not a day before,” he says, feet planted, stubborn authority in every line of his body. He’s not budging on this one, she can tell, and the realization makes her anger surge again, tightening her fists until she thinks her bones will crack.

“If you don’t trust me just fucking say it!” she says, voice loud but with a waver underneath. She swallows hard around the rock in her throat. She will not cry. She will make him take her seriously. He deflates a bit and she wonders if he’s heard how close she is to breaking down.

“Ellie, baby, it’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the world. We’re not on the road anymore. We have the luxury of you not having to be on guard 24/7. I may not be your dad, but I’m here to watch out for you. Let me do that. Let me handle the Outside. Let yourself be a kid for a minute,” he pleads. It’s an olive branch, but she doesn’t want one.

“Fuck you, man. I’ve never had the chance to be a kid, and fuck you for forgetting that,” she says bitterly. She’s a FEDRA orphan who went straight from the hell of the QZ to fighting infected across the country to being captured, propositioned, and assaulted by a cult leader, and that’s only scratching the surface. She doubts she’s even capable of, much less interested in, the cushy childhood bullshit the rest of these soft Jackson-raised kids wallow in every day.

He looks at the floor, head bowed.

“And if it’s ‘your house, your rules,’ maybe I’ll just find another house,” she says. His head snaps back up and he makes a sound like he’s been punched. She chooses to ignore it, avoiding his eyes even as her own burn hot, her throat tight. She slams the screen door open a third time and charges down the porch steps into the cold wind.

This time, he lets her go.

***

Joel sights along the barrel of his rifle, breathes out, and pulls the trigger. He feels a weak pulse of satisfaction at the sight of an oncoming raider instantly toppling backwards off his horse, but things are rapidly going from bad to worse, and mostly he’s grateful he didn’t waste any of their dwindling ammunition by missing a shot. Another house down the block explodes in flames, and he swears under his breath.

He hands his rifle off to Ellie, who immediately hands him a freshly loaded gun. She’s crouched between him and Tommy, reloading their weapons as they pick off as many raiders as they can from the upstairs windows of his and Ellie’s house. Maria is keeping guard at the far window. She’s a fierce fighter, but not a sharpshooter like he and Tommy are, and she’d opted for rearguard with no complaint. Baby Isaiah lies in the crib Joel had carved for him for sleepovers at Uncle Joel’s house, placed as far as possible from windows and any chance of being hit by bullets or flying debris.

Was it only a few hours ago that he and Ellie were raging at each other about her being old enough to go on patrol? Like a sore tooth, he can’t stop prodding at the memory of their fight. It’s a tight ache inside him even through the chaotic swirl of violence sweeping through Jackson. He loves her so much. He wishes she could see that he doesn’t keep her off patrol to be an asshole. He keeps her off patrol because that’s the type of care and protection she deserves, whether or not she considers herself his daughter.

He gets off another shot, this time taking down a raider trying to sneak over their fence. Someone has clearly cottoned on to their little sniper nest and thinks they’re going to get lucky. Fat fucking chance. Joel hands off his gun to Ellie as he watches the next invader in line collapse in a spray of blood, courtesy of Tommy.

After a tense and quiet dinner in the mess hall, at which he and Ellie didn’t speak to each other and Maria and Tommy very carefully did not ask why, the Miller families had split off to their own houses by unspoken mutual agreement. It was clearly not a night for family boardgames and chit-chat, and only Isaiah had seemed unaffected by the strained atmosphere, babbling contentedly to himself.

The first explosion had come less than an hour later.

Joel had run out onto the front porch, looking across to see Tommy burst out onto his own front step, Maria right behind him, Isaiah cradled protectively to her chest. The screen door creaked behind Joel, and Ellie stepped up next to him, curiosity too strong to let her uphold her self-imposed exile in her bedroom. The sound of galloping hooves drew his attention and he turned to see Margaret Ballard riding hell for leather up the street. She pulled up in front of Tommy and Maria, panting.

“Raiders in Jackson,” she reported to Maria. “Don’t know how they got through the gate. Looks to be more than forty of them. They already took the assembly hall, and killed Laura and Dean Jefferson and Max Wells.”

Maria had taken this in with a sharp inhale, then seemed to gather herself, nodding sharply.

“Stay decentralized. We’re easier to capture or kill if we herd together. Spread the word, tell folks to shelter in place and defend themselves where they are. Once we get their numbers down, we can come out, join forces, and round them up,” she said. She’d made eye contact with first Tommy and then Joel, as though to double check her strategy, and Joel nodded at her. She’s the political leader of the town, and she knows those types of tactics inside and out. But she’s not too proud to acknowledge that he and Tommy have more experience of raw violence and how to beat it back.

“Grab your weapons and come over here, our second floor is more defensible,” Joel had called out to them. They nodded and disappeared back inside their house as Margaret dug her heels into her horse’s flanks, riding off to spread Maria’s message.

He’d looked down at Ellie. There was a hint of fear in her eyes, but her earlier anger was absent. She’s mature enough to realize that their fight needed to be set aside for now, and he’d spared a moment to give thanks for that. He’d placed a hand on her back to help ground her.

“Grab the extra ammunition and meet me upstairs,” he’d said, and she’d nodded, slamming the screen door open again in her haste.

Now he looks down at her, flyaway hairs haloing out from her bent head as she reloads their guns with smooth, practiced speed, focused and intent. He wants to reach out and smooth down those little baby hairs, to assure himself that she’s okay, and have just a split second of the tactile comfort of touching his kid with affection and care.

“Joel,” Tommy says, and his strangled tone has Joel turning back at once to look out the window. Only to immediately wish he hadn’t.

Mei Li is kneeling in the street screaming, bent over the limp body of her three-year-old daughter, Genji, in her arms. Her six-year-old son, Jun, stands in front of them both, shakily pointing a pistol at the raider rapidly advancing toward them.

Joel works the bolt action on his rifle as fast as he can, swinging up to aim, but he’s too late. The raider shoots them each in the head, their blood rising in a fine mist over their collapsed bodies. Tommy hits the raider a split second later, a second shot from Joel thudding into his body and propelling him back and down.

Joel glances over at Tommy and sees the private dread on his face, both of them holding back words they won’t speak in Ellie’s hearing. The raiders are killing kids. They’re up against the worst, most ruthless type of motherfuckers, who will torture, rape, and murder with no hesitation.

Screams and the pounding staccato of galloping horses rises from all directions. Every few moments another orange mushroom of fire erupts somewhere, and smoke drifts in the open windows like a shroud.

“Molotov cocktails,” Joel says, and Tommy nods. Whoever this group is, they’re clearly not too fussed about taking the town intact. With a sick swoop of his stomach, Joel pushes away an image of what would happen if a Molotov cocktail came flying through their own window. He’ll just have to make sure no one gets close enough to lob one. He squints out into the haze and shoots, picking off another raider and sending the raider’s horse careening off in confusion.

The crack of a shot pierces the air and there’s a crash behind them. Joel looks back to see Maria sprawled out on the floor, a pool of blood rapidly spreading from her head. Tommy drops his rifle with a clatter, an inarticulate cry tearing from his throat as he rushes to her. Joel looks down at Ellie, who meets his eyes, face pale with fear. He hands her his rifle.

“Stay as low as you can and still have a clear view. Anyone gets within twenty feet of the house, take them out. Can you do that?”

She nods, firming her chin with determination, and he squeezes her arm before hurrying over to Tommy and Maria. He prays he’ll be helping care for his wounded sister-in-law, not shielding Ellie from watching her bleed out in Tommy’s arms.

He thuds to his knees next to them. Tommy has her crushed in his embrace, rocking her frantically, eyes squeezed shut, and for a long, cold moment, Joel fears the worst. But then he sees her chest rise and fall, and he can breathe again.

“Tommy, she’s alive,” Joel says. “She’s alive, little brother, let’s figure out what she needs.”

Tommy opens his eyes and looks down at her as though he’s afraid of what he’ll see, but he places a shaky hand to her throat. Joel can tell when he focuses enough to actually feel her pulse, a minute amount of the tension locked in his body draining away.

Blood streams down over her ear and neck from the side of her head, and Joel parts her braids to try to find the wound. If the bullet penetrated her brain, they’re basically fucked, and from Tommy’s tight, rapid breaths, he knows it too.

Blotting at the blood with the hem of his sleeve, Joel squints down in the scant light and tries to get a good look. He blows out a breath of relief.

“She was grazed, Tommy,” he says. “It’s knocked her for a loop, but she’s going to be okay.”

“You sure?” Tommy asks, looking up at him for reassurance the same way he’d done a thousand times in their childhood.

“Let’s get her on the bed,” Joel says, not wanting to make promises he can’t keep. A graze wound is a hell of a lot better than a bullet to the brain, but she’s still unconscious and bleeding, and they don’t know how hard of a hit she took. Tommy’s so frazzled he doesn’t pick up on the evasiveness of the non-answer, just grabbing Maria’s shoulders as Joel stands to grab her ankles. They drape her over the bed as gently as possible, sidestepping Isaiah’s crib.

“Joel!” Ellie shouts, and he leaves Tommy to care for Maria, hotfooting it back to Ellie’s side. His hands spasm with horror when he sees what has her so panicked. Raiders have dragged three more children into the street, and even as Joel scrambles to grab Tommy’s rifle, desperate to stop what’s happening, he hears Ellie’s rifle crack next to him once, twice.

She hits two of the raiders, but before he can get the third, all three kids are sprawled in the street, little bodies in a bloody, twisted heap in the dirt.

Joel looks up as Tommy steps back up to his side, the cuffs of his shirt wet with blood. Joel glances back to see Maria laid out on the bed, Isaiah’s baby blanket knotted tightly around her head. A dark patch of blood is already spreading on the light blue fabric.

As Ellie reloads and aims out the window, her jaw clenched, Joel’s gaze meets his brother’s. Tommy’s dark eyes, normally so full of laughter, are grave, fear tracing itself across the tense line of his brow. They stare at each other for a long moment, grim resignation growing in the air between them.

“You got any better ideas?” Joel asks. Tommy’s lips thin, but he shakes his head as he takes his rifle back from Joel.

“None. Get them ready, I’ll cover us,” Tommy says, his voice curt as he turns back to the window and raises his weapon.

“Ellie,” he says, gently taking the rifle from her and pulling her away from the window to the center of the room. He grips her shoulders and looks down into her wide brown eyes, seeing her hands fisted at her sides.

“You’ve seen what they’re doing to kids out there. Right now, we’re not winning this fight, and we’ve got to get Isaiah and you out of here. Your aunt is hurt, and we’re running out of ammunition. You remember where the bolt-hole through the outer wall is?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she responds, shoulders tense under his hands but resolutely focused on his words. “Back behind the second storehouse.”

“You’ve got to be extra careful because they’re going to be looking to steal supplies, and almost all the food we’ve put up for winter is stashed there. Do whatever you can to stay out of sight,” he says. He scoops Isaiah out of his crib, a warm, familiar weight in his hands.

The eight-month-old’s eyes are wide and alert as he kicks his legs, miraculously not tearful despite the noise and chaos. Joel places Isaiah in Ellie’s arms and starts winding the baby sling around her torso. She’s so little he has to loop it around her multiple times to take up all the fabric, securing it with a knot at the small of her back, Isaiah snug under her chin.

He picks up a pistol sitting on the bedside table and helps her stuff it into the back of her jeans. A wry quirk of her mouth tells him she remembers the number of times he’s specifically told her not to carry a gun this way, but the smile fades quickly when he doesn’t have it in him to respond to her brief flash of humor.

“Your go-bag is in the downstairs closet,” he says, grateful for the paranoia that pushed him into keeping full packs of supplies for them ready to snatch up at a moment’s notice. He snags Maria’s rifle, making sure it’s fully loaded, and helps Ellie sling it over her shoulder. “You’ll have enough supplies for 48 hours, 72 if you stretch it. Make your way to the hunting cabin in the north woods, and we will come for you, as soon as we can.”

He keeps his voice as level as he can despite the keening alarm screaming through his head. It’s absolute madness to be sending a fourteen-year-old carrying a baby out into a pitched battle with raiders, but Jackson is on the verge of being overtaken completely. He and Tommy are not going to abandon Maria, and trying to escape carrying her dead weight will slow them down so much they might as well hand themselves over to the raiders and be done with it. Plus she needs medical attention, and that means staying in Jackson.

He knows Tommy has made his way through the same bleak calculus. The way things are going, it’s only a matter of time before the raiders take this house. Better to give their kids a fighting chance than to see them burned alive or shot in the street. Jackson’s leader is unconscious and bleeding on the bed behind them, and he and Tommy are going to have enough on their hands to keep her safe, especially if the raiders have any idea of her importance to the town.

“Okay,” Ellie says. He sees courage and fear warring in her eyes as she inhales deeply, adjusting the rifle strap across her shoulder. The gun is almost as long as she is tall.

“Hey,” he says, softening his voice as he cups her face with both hands. Her eyes snap up to his, her raw faith in him humbling him as it always does. “I trust you. Tommy trusts you with Isaiah. You’ve got this. What are your watchwords?”

“Speed and silence,” she says, the same slogan he’s drilled into her since their first days on the road.

“Speed and silence,” he repeats, turning her toward the door and trying to ignore the collapsing sensation in his chest at the thought of knowingly sending her out into danger. “You’ve got Isaiah to protect, which means you have to make good decisions to keep yourself safe, for his sake.”

She straightens with the responsibility, reaching back to tighten her ponytail.

“I can do it. I won’t let you down,” she says, looking up at him, grit and determination in every line of her poised body.

“I know you won’t, baby girl,” he says, bending down to press a long kiss to her hairline, his hand completely covering her smaller one on Isaiah’s back, praying it won’t be the last time he’s able to do this. “Now go.”

She turns and ghosts down the stairs, quick and silent even bearing the weight of her cousin and the rifle. He walks back to the second window. Tommy reaches out a hand and Joel squeezes it hard before letting go and raising his own rifle.

He sights along the barrel and pulls the trigger.

***

Chapter Text

“Speed and silence, speed and silence, speed and silence,” Ellie chants to herself under her breath as she jogs through the back streets of Jackson. Saying the words out loud technically violates the ‘silence’ part, but she doesn’t think anyone is going to hear her over the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and screams. And it makes her breath come a bit easier to say the words in rhythm to the pounding of her feet, so fuck it.

Isaiah is a warm weight against her front, counterbalanced by the heavy pack of supplies on her back. The rifle hangs over one shoulder, and she carries the pistol in her opposite hand, ready to fucking end anyone who gets in their way. Her adrenaline is surging, and even though she knows it would be best if she stays completely unseen, part of her almost wants to get caught so she can unleash some vengeance on these fuckers who think they can take over her town.

But the memory of Maria, silent and bloody on the bed back at their house, cools that desire. Except when he was out of his mind with pain in the basement in Colorado, Joel has never before sent her away from him during a dangerous situation in the whole time she’s known him. That alone tells her how bad he thinks things are going to get. The fact that he and Tommy had her take Isaiah makes her dinner curdle in her stomach with a sick rush of nausea. They must believe these raiders are truly terrible motherfuckers.

Like she needed any additional evidence, having seen them murder her neighbors in cold blood, including kids, right in front of her.

She peers around the corner of a house and rears back again with a sharp intake of breath. A line of raiders, some on horseback and some on foot, are advancing down the street, kicking aside bodies as they go. It’s a more organized, more unified looking maneuver than anything she’s seen from them so far, and she grips her pistol harder, trying to prevent it from sliding out of her sweaty grip. Have the raiders won? Are they in charge now?

She skirts around the back of house away from them and cuts across another block, approaching the winter storehouse from a roundabout angle. Isaiah shifts against her, making a soft snuffling noise, and she pats his back with her free hand.

“Thanks for staying quiet, buddy,” she whispers to him, not knowing what she would do if he did decide to start screaming. She doesn’t have his diaper bag with her, and it dawns on her that not only does that mean no binky, it means no bottles and no actual cloth diapers. She hopes Joel and Tommy are able to get to them quickly or she’s going to have to do some serious improvising.

After a couple of more close calls with raiders that require ducking behind woodpiles and backyard sheds, the second storehouse comes into view. Joel was right—raiders are steadily carrying foodstuffs out of the storehouse and loading them onto packhorses. Fucking greedy assholes. Hopefully they’re so focused on their robbery that they won’t notice her ducking around back. Stepping gingerly over the sprawled out bodies of two dead raiders, she darts behind the far wall, and there it is: the bolt-hole.

It’s essentially a secret door in the outer wall of Jackson. For the first few months they’d been in Jackson after Salt Lake, Joel had been jumpy as all hell. He’d packed, checked, and re-checked their go-bags and spent endless hours walking the perimeter of the town walls and scowling at patrollers as though doubting their expertise. His anxiety was so palpable that Tommy had eventually thrown up his hands in exasperation one night after dinner.

“Look, asshole, why don’t you just cut yourself a bolt-hole? That’s the only way you’re going to sleep easy and quit driving the rest of us up a wall. It’ll be our secret, and you’ll always have a back way out of town if you and Ellie need it,” Tommy said.

Joel had glared at him, arms folded with a defensiveness that eventually faded into relief and grudging gratitude. He and Tommy, with Ellie looking on in fascination and handing them tools, had taken one Saturday when Maria was in a lengthy council meeting to sneak behind the storehouse and fashion a small door in the outer wall that’s virtually invisible to anyone who doesn’t know where to look for it.

Her eyes burn, remembering how she’d taken all his precautions, all the care he’d put into making her a safe home, and thrown it back in his face just a few hours ago. She’d give anything to go back and undo their fight. It seems so petty now, and even though he’d sent her off with all his customary gentleness, she hadn’t missed the pain lurking at the back of his eyes, and she knows she had a part in causing it.

But she can’t fix any of that now. All she can do is try to keep herself and Isaiah safe, because that’s what Joel had asked of her. She steps up to the concealed door, slides her hand into the hidden groove and lifts the peg that holds it in place. One quick glance around to make sure she’s unobserved, and then, holding the baby and the rifle close to her body, she ducks through and pulls it shut behind her.

She’s out.

A deep breath releases some of the tension in her body, but the sharp winter scent of the frigid air tells her snow is coming. Better get to the cabin as quick as possible. Speed and silence.

She jogs along next to the wall, hoping to stay in the meager cover of its shadow as long as possible. But as she comes to the end of the wall, ready to make a break for the tree line, she skids to a halt. There are plumes of smoke coming from the north woods.

Shit, damn, and fuck. The raiders are camped in the north woods.

She’s been unbelievably lucky so far, but striding right into the middle of their camp would be idiotic. She can try to skirt them to get to the cabin, but Isaiah is not going to stay quiet forever. He’s a sweet baby, but kids cry, and as she’s seen already, if they’re found, they’ll be shot, no questions asked. She clutches Isaiah close to her, lungs seizing at the thought of a bullet piercing his tiny body, and he lets out a small whimper.

“Sorry, buddy,” she says to him, loosening her grip and rubbing his back. “We gotta go to plan B.”

But what is plan B? She crouches against the wall and tries to think strategically, the way Joel would. Why had he sent them to the cabin? To get them out of Jackson, safe from the raiders and in shelter where they would be okay until he could get to them. 48 to 72 hours, he’d said, although she hopes he comes for them a lot sooner than that. What are her other options?

There’s another hunting cabin in the south woods, but that would mean traversing all the way around the outer perimeter of Jackson. It’s a long way, and she’s not sure they could make it before dark, much less avoid capture with raiders coming and going through both town gates.

That leaves the fisherman’s cabin on Lake Island. She bites her lip. Is that what Joel would do? How will he know where to find them? She shakes her head. There’s nothing for it. It’s cold and getting colder. It’s likely to start snowing at any minute, and she has to get Isaiah safe and warm before dark, away from the raiders. Lake Island it is.

She gets to her feet and resettles her rifle, her back aching from carrying the unfamiliar weight of Isaiah-plus-supplies. She blows out a breath and pushes away from the wall, eastward toward the lake.

She settles into a ground-eating trot, again letting the rhythm calm her. The movement seems to soothe Isaiah as well, and she thinks he may even be asleep against her. Speed and silence, speed and silence, the words spin in a comforting loop through her brain.

She’s so focused on getting to the lake’s edge that she forgets to pay close attention to her surroundings, until a noise breaks through her fog.

The terrible clicking sound that has followed her all the way from Boston.

Infected.

Fucking, fucking hell, and she hasn’t been quiet at all, crashing through the brush like a buffalo. She freezes, but she knows it’s too late, and she’s right.

She takes off, but before she can make it more than five steps, she’s bowled off her feet by an infected, biting and clawing at her and Isaiah. Startled into wakefulness by their crash into the ground, Isaiah starts screaming, but she can’t spare a thought for comforting him. The rifle is a hard line against her back, the strap tangled with her pack, and it’s too big for a close quarters fight anyway. She kicks furiously, trying to shove the infected back, and with an almighty heave, she forces it back just far enough to drive her pistol into its face and fire.

Its head explodes in a disgusting spray of gore over her and Isaiah, and she surges to her feet, Isaiah sobbing against her chest, little feet kicking in distress. She churns her legs through the tangled brush, more clicks and screams echoing around her in a growing cacophony. There’s no way she can calm Isaiah enough for them to be able to hide, she’s going to have to sprint for it.

Her breath heaves in her chest as the primal fear of the hunted sparks through her limbs, leaving them quivering with frantic energy. She runs, dodging trees, occasionally slipping on wet leaves and regaining her balance with desperate determination, knowing if she falls, they’re done for. Isaiah’s crying is like a beacon calling the infected to them, and their clicks and growls surround her on every side.

The lakeside. She’s got to make it to the rowboat on the lake—that’s her best chance of shaking them off.

Rounding a huge oak tree, she can just make out the water ahead in the gathering twilight, when a weight slams into her from behind, driving her forward and down. She drops the pistol and throws both arms around Isaiah, trying to protect him from being crushed underneath her. Her head is yanked backward sharply and she cries out in pain, neck torqued and scalp screaming. It has her by the hair.

She wrenches her head forward, rolls onto her back, and looks up into the missing face of an infected, strands of her hair dangling from its gnashing teeth. It drives down toward her and she tries to turn her hands and arms into an impenetrable shield over Isaiah’s head and body. She can’t let him be bitten.

She succeeds in blocking the infected from the baby, but pain explodes in her right forearm, then the back of her left hand, one bite, two. Rolling to her side, she scrabbles frantically in the wet leaves for the pistol. Fucking hell, where is it? A burst of agony in the meat of her shoulder: a third bite. Jesus Christ, she hopes her vaunted immunity is the real fucking deal. She’s never been bitten this many times at once before.

Finally the cold smooth weight of the pistol hits her palm, and she swings around, firing wildly. The infected staggers back from the multiple bullets and finally goes down. She lurches to her feet and sprints for the water, Isaiah’s breath choppy with the force of his sobs.

The rowboat is right where it always is, tied up to a boulder in the shallows, and she splashes into the freezing water and rips the rope loop off the rock, throwing it into the boat. She swings one foot into the boat and turns back to look as she hears splashing behind her. Most infected won’t cross water, but this one is pretty far gone, whorls and tendrils of fungus so plentiful it’s almost impossible to tell it was once human.

Drawing on a well of terror-fueled strength, she snatches up an oar and wields it like a spear, driving the broad end of it directly into the infected’s throat. It falls back, choking, and she doesn’t wait for it to recover. Dragging the oar with her, she vaults into the rowboat and pushes off, slinging her rifle into the stern but not bothering to take her pack off. Her breath is sharp in her lungs as she pulls and pulls and pulls on the oars, clawing them out onto the water as fast as she can.

Isaiah’s cries finally start to dwindle as they shoot out across the freezing water, the first stars pinpricking the sky in the early winter twilight. The screams and clicks of the infected dim as well—she was right, they won’t come into the water after her. Most of them are so deformed by the fungus they no longer have the ability to swim.

Her heart pounds in her ears as she rows with all of her strength, trying to extend her adrenaline’s power as long as she can. Normally Joel or Tommy would be rowing while she navigates, but this time she’s on her own. She risks a glance over her shoulder and while the island is still frighteningly far away, she’s headed right for it.

She faces forward and keeps rowing as straight as she can, ignoring the growing fatigue in her arms. She won’t get a second shot at this. If she misses the island, the current could sweep her out further into the lake, and who knows if she could make it back.

Joel had taught her to swim over the summer, and while she’ll never be an Olympian, she can keep herself alive. But even if she could survive the ice-cold November lake water, her lessons had never covered swimming with an eight-month-old strapped to her chest—she can’t even picture a way to swim without drowning him. She ducks her head to kiss the top of his head as he sniffles and squirms. Poor kid. What a shitty day.

She straightens back up and keeps hauling at the oars, cold wind slicing across the sweat on her face and neck and making her shiver even through her exertion. The first flakes of snow drift down over her, melting as they hit the water. She sniffs and hitches a shoulder up to swipe at her running nose.

Keep going. Just keep going.

***

Joel takes point, making his way down the stairs of their house. Tommy’s footsteps echo behind him, slightly heavier under the weight of his wife in his arms. A thin thread of dread winds itself through Joel’s gut, and he breathes deeply to try to dissipate it.

They’d held out on the second floor as long as they could, both to give Ellie and Isaiah a head start and also in hopes of turning the tide against the raiders. But it soon became clear that the latter was a futile hope. The sounds of gunfire and explosions slowly died out and ceased entirely right around the time they used the last of their ammunition.

Joel had leaned his rifle against the windowsill and looked over to his brother. Tommy’s face was lined with fatigue and grief, his mouth tight under his mustache as he eased one hip onto the bed next to Maria.

“She’s not waking up. We need to get her some help,” Tommy said, picking up Maria’s limp hand and clasping it in both of his own.

“You’re right, but the raiders will have taken over all the public buildings. We go to the clinic, we’re playing right into their hands,” he said. Tommy had looked up, brow furrowed.

“What about Jillian Simpson’s house?” he’d asked. Joel nodded, it’s a good thought. Jillian had been a nurse in the Before. She lives on the edge of town and has hopefully stayed out of the worst of the fighting.

Now Joel travels in a half-crouch across his backyard, muscles tense and primed to fight, breath clouding in the cold November air. He and Tommy have armed themselves with every blade in the house, their guns useless without bullets.

Three tense blocks later, Joel is knocking on Jillian’s back door. She meets them with the barrel of her shotgun, swinging it down and away when she sees Maria cradled in Tommy’s arms.

“Get in here,” she hisses, holding her screen door open and beckoning them in. They waste no time in obeying, and she leads them into her kitchen. “Lay her out on the table, and let me take a look.”

“What have you heard?” Joel asks as Tommy carefully deposits Maria on the kitchen table, cradling her head to lay it down softly. Jillian looks up from where she’s scrubbing her hands in the sink.

“Eduardo came by. He said he was going house to house to see if anyone had more ammunition stores, but it doesn’t look good. The raiders have taken the clinic, the assembly hall, the mess hall, both storehouses, and most of the homes. Some folks are still holding out, but essentially the raiders have taken control of Jackson. People are wondering why they haven’t heard from Maria,” she finishes.

The wave of anger that crashes over Tommy is unmistakable. He surges toward Jillian, fists clenched and jaw jutting out with rage.

“They haven’t heard from her because she was fucking shot in the head,” he grits. Joel steps between them and pushes Tommy back with one hand, holding up the other in placation.

“Easy, brother, it’s not Jillian’s fault,” he says. Jillian seems unimpressed by Tommy’s display, stepping past him and opening her first aid kit on the table.

“Well, I know that now, Tommy, but the rest of the town doesn’t,” she says, untying Isaiah’s blanket and gently tilting Maria’s head away from her before leaning in to examine the wound. She straightens and turns back to them.

“This needs care, but it’s not immediately life-threatening. You two fuck off out of my house and go do something useful, like spreading the word that Maria’s alive.”

She turns back to Maria and it’s clear she’s done with them. Tommy, subdued again after the swift flash of anger, steps toward the table and leans down, pressing a long kiss to Maria’s forehead and whispering something to her. Then he straightens and settles his shoulders.

“Thanks, Jillian,” Joel says as they walk back toward the back door. “Stay safe.”

“Do no harm, take no shit, that’s my motto,” she agrees with a half-grin. That seems a bit amplified from the original Hippocratic Oath, at least the way Joel remembers it, but he can’t deny it suits her.

Joel and Tommy jog away from Jillian’s house, eager to distance themselves quickly. If they get caught by raiders, they don’t want to draw any attention to Jillian or Maria, still vulnerable and unconscious. Four houses down, Joel slows to a halt, tugging Tommy’s arm to stop him.

“Let’s re-group,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

Joel knows what he wants to do—unleash the fires of hell on these raiders—but Tommy had left him in the QZ precisely because Joel couldn’t divorce himself from the unhinged violence that had been the only thing driving him in those days. Ellie is beyond his care right now, but Tommy has a wife a hundred yards away. This needs to be his call.

“I’ll tell you exactly what I want to do. I want to kill every motherfucking raider in this town until Jackson is ours again,” Tommy says, his eyes hard in a way Joel hasn’t seen for years. Joel steps back, startled.

“You sure, little brother? We could just sneak out, go after Ellie and Isaiah,” Joel offers, part of him longing to do exactly that. A pinched wave of helpless futility makes his spine ache, thinking of his daughter and nephew all alone in the fast-descending dark and cold.

“And then what? If the raiders take over Jackson, it won’t be safe to bring them home. I have faith in Ellie, she can handle herself long enough for us to deal with this,” Tommy says, gripping the hilt of his hunting knife so hard his knuckles are white.

Another pang of pride mixed with fear grips Joel’s throat hearing Tommy’s staunch belief in Ellie. He shakes himself. He can’t do anything for her at the moment, he has to have faith in her survival skills until he can get to her. For now, if Tommy wants to wreak a little vengeance, he’s more than game.

“Full guerrilla mode, then?” Joel says, unable to keep a fierce grin from rising to his lips. “Wage a little asymmetrical warfare and show these fuckers who’s boss?”

Tommy’s smile glints back at him with the same ferocity.

“Big brother, welcome to the Jackson Insurgency,” he says, unsheathing his knife and twirling it with a flourish. “These jackasses are about to find out how the Miller boys do business.”

***

With merciless violence that is silent and precise for all its viciousness is how the Millers do business. At least until Tommy fucks it all up.

They’ve made their way from street to street, ambushing and slitting the throats of raiders. Each time they find a Jackson resident hunkered down somewhere, they tell them to hang on, that Maria is alive, that there is hope.

Then they hunt down another raider, and then another, and then another.

Joel realizes with a distant part of his mind that it is actually pretty fucked up how quickly he and Tommy return to their QZ rhythm of murderous destruction wrought only with knives and brute force. With a perspective born of months of peace in Jackson with Ellie, he can see how the Joel he was when Tommy left was an empty shell of a man, held together by nothing but rage and brutality.

But as he looks across at his brother’s detached, blood-spattered face as he grabs another raider from behind, covering his mouth so he can’t shout and then neatly gutting him, he reflects that rage is a hell of a drug.

And Tommy is clearly clinging to the cleansing distraction of revenge. Joel has unfortunately carried the knowledge of Ellie being alone and in danger before, in Silver Lake, but this is the first time Tommy has had to face his son and wife being in harm’s way when he’s not with them. Joel can see the fear and fury eating away at Tommy beneath his cool, efficient violence, but he’s holding it together. For now.

Or at least he was, until they’re crouched in the alley next to the dining hall, waiting for the next unfortunate invader to cross their path. Footsteps thunk on the boardwalk outside the hall, and voices float down.

“We good on ammunition?” a male voice asks.

“All set. The eastern quadrant is completely cleared out, and it shouldn’t be too long before we round up the last of the stragglers in the other sectors,” another replies.

Joel strains his ears. If they can get a sense of the raiders’ strategy, they can fight back more effectively.

“One thing we still haven’t done, and that’s find that Miller bitch who runs things around here. Put the word out to take her alive. We need to make an example of her,” the first voice replies.

Joel hears a sharp intake of breath at his side, and with a rush of air next to him, Tommy is gone, the canvas of his coat tearing itself from Joel’s palm as he wrenches free from Joel’s grip. Swearing under his breath, Joel follows, determined to save his wayward brother from his own fool self. Tommy was sorely provoked, he’ll allow, but getting them both killed is no way to save Maria.

Joel wades into the fight as more raiders boil out of the mess hall into the fray, his mind going quiet as he slices and stabs with his hunting knife. Tommy is not fighting smart, he can see, his movements wild, too overcome with emotion to pay proper attention to defending himself. Joel kicks one raider in the head, elbows another in the face with satisfying crunch, and slits the throat of a third as he tries to make his way to his brother’s side.

Tommy’s face is a mask of rage, and he raises his arm high to drive his knife into the face of the raider who insulted Maria. But before he can swing his weapon down, another raider grabs his arm on the upswing and yanks it back, kicking the back of Tommy’s right knee. With a cry of pain Tommy crumples. The raider grabs Tommy’s hair roughly and holds a knife to his throat.

Joel freezes, a fist of ice squeezing his heart, and releases the raider he has in a headlock. He steps back, drops his knife, and raises his hands. The freed raider gets to his feet and punches Joel in the face and then in the gut, and Joel doubles over, wheezing.

A man whose commanding demeanor marks him out as the group’s leader steps over one of the scattered bodies and pushes Joel upright by the shoulder, looking between Joel and Tommy. The few raiders they hadn’t finished off in the skirmish moan where they lie in the dirt. Joel can feel blood running over his lip and hear it drip onto the ground with a steady patter.

“Well, look at what we have here,” the leader says, his voice identifying him as the first man who had spoken on the porch. He’s wiry, with a full head of white hair and lines of cruelty etched around his mouth. “It’s the Miller bitch’s husband and his brother. I think we’ll find her right quick now.”

Joel searches out his brother’s gaze as someone grips his wrists in a bruising hold and pins his arms behind his back, silently begging Tommy not to do anything stupid. Maria is hurt and their kids are outside the gates, if they made it all—please, God, let Ellie and Isaiah be safe, let them have made it through. Joel and Tommy have no leverage. They have to survive long enough to make a move.

Tommy’s jaw clenches where he kneels in the dirt, but he nods minutely. As Joel feels rope being wound roughly around his wrists in crude handcuffs, he tries to infuse strength and calm into his gaze. He wants Tommy to know that he’s not alone, that his big brother is with him whatever happens, just like he was when things got bad with their stepdad when they were kids. He fixes his eyes on his brother’s face, memorizing it.

The leader steps up in front of him, gloating meanness in every angle of his ugly smirk, and Joel braces himself. Things are almost certainly about to get much, much worse.

The leader turns his head and spits in the dirt, then nods to someone out of Joel’s view. There’s a sharp pain at the back of Joel’s head. Darkness swallows everything.

***

Chapter Text

The cold bites through Ellie’s clothes and her arms tremble with fatigue as she drags the rowboat onshore, indifferent to securing it properly as the snow changes over to sleet, icy pellets stinging her hands and face. With a mental apology to Joel and his endless lectures on maritime protocol (it’s a rowboat, not an aircraft carrier, she always tells him, even though she’s a bit hazy on what an aircraft carrier actually is), as soon as three-quarters of the boat is onshore, she lets it go, not even bothering to fish out the rope and tie it to something.

She has to get the baby indoors, and she knows herself well enough to realize that her own body is on the verge of giving out. Her adrenaline has long since faded and her knees shake with exhaustion, even while her three bites from the infected throb dully in time with her pulse.

Her thighs burn with weariness as she climbs the hill from the water’s edge to the cabin, hidden just out of sight among the pine trees. She musters one last burst of effort to ascend the porch steps, opening the door with a huff of relief and almost falling inside.

“We made it, buddy,” she says on a heavy sigh as she shuts the door behind her and leans against it, cupping the back of Isaiah’s head in a brief moment of respite.

The cabin is dim in the freezing twilight, darkened further by the icy rain, and her first priority is warmth. Luckily the cabin is always kept stocked by Joel, Tommy, and the handful of others who use it as a fishing retreat. It had likely belonged to one family in the Before, but now it’s a common resource, just like everything in Jackson.

Ellie props the rifle against the wall by the door, ready to snatch up at a moment’s notice, and lifts the heavy crossbar into its slot, barring entry to any threats. She’d seen no sign of raiders or infected on her short climb up from the beach, but this is no time to tempt fate. She unhooks her pack from her shoulders, letting the straps slide down her arms with a groan of relief loud enough to make Isaiah look up at her, eyes wide. She grins down and him and a watery smile blooms on his little face, tear-streaked as it is.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m starved. What do you say we figure out a snack, yeah?” she says to him, dropping a kiss to his curly head.

After some fumbling with fingers made clumsy by cold, she manages to untie the baby wrap knotted at her back. As she unwinds it, a host of dangers to an eight-month-old catch her eye all around the rustic one-room space. It’s not exactly baby-proofed.

Well, she’d known she’d have to improvise. Finally freeing Isaiah from the wrap, she snags a quilt off the ratty old sofa and spreads it out on the floor a few feet away from the fireplace. She sets Isaiah down and he immediately rolls onto his back and begins playing with his feet while she pushes the sofa forward to meet the edge of the quilt. Dragging two other kitchen chairs over and laying them sideways, she builds a makeshift playpen facing the fireplace with Isaiah in the center. She’ll just have to watch him herself to keep him from crawling into the fire.

Once she makes one. With the baby momentarily settled, she turns to the woodpile. Oak and ash for a low-smoke fire—the last thing she wants is to draw anyone’s attention—and pine cones for quick kindling. She spares a grateful thought for Joel and his careful lessons over the months they were on the road. She’s got a way better shot of keeping Isaiah and herself safe than she would have had in her Boston city-girl days.

Joel. Is he on his way to them already? Does he even know where to look? What will happen when he goes to the north woods and they’re not there? What happened with the raiders? The invaders had looked far from defeated when Ellie had escaped Jackson, but she knows better than to discount Joel, or Tommy for that matter. They’ll be coming for her, she just has to stay smart and alert until they can get here.

The fire catches mercifully quickly, the crackling flames radiating a comforting warmth that makes her shoulders loosen a bit. It’s the first moment of physical ease she can remember since the sound of an explosion had drawn her out onto the porch with Joel after supper, which feels like it happened six months ago rather than a few hours.

There’s a decent amount of shelf-stable food in the cabin, but she decides to keep things simple. If she remembers correctly—yep, there it is. A can of Chef Boyardee that Joel had placed on the log shelves next to the sink with the other foodstuffs, grinning at her and saying that they could have it the next time she actually caught a fish rather than sitting on the shore like a lawn ornament for three hours. Whatever a lawn ornament was. Fuck, now that she’s not fighting infected or dodging raiders, everything seems to remind her of Joel. And how he’s not here with her.

But after the shit day they’ve all had, Chef Boyardee is the least the universe owes her, and she pours it into a small pot and hangs it over the fire to warm.

Now, the real battle. Isaiah’s diaper. She squares her shoulders.

She knows her go-bag will contain nothing useful in that regard, and the poor kid has probably been wet or worse for hours—there hasn’t exactly been time to check. She pushes up from the hearth and scans the cabin, which now feels almost homey with the fire’s warm glow making the shadows friendly rather than threatening.

What can she use for a diaper? A bath towel will be too big and a hand towel likely too small. She settles at last on a pillowcase. It’s about the right size, and will be soft enough not to irritate his sensitive baby skin. She doesn’t change his diaper that often back in Jackson, but she knows diaper rash can be a real bitch and she doesn’t have any of the soothing cream that Maria keeps in Isaiah’s nursery on the changing table that Joel built.

Another pang of worry clenches under her ribs. Has Maria woken up? How badly was she hurt? It had been so strange to see her face, normally so mobile with strength and command, slack and silent, streaked with blood.

Shaking her head, Ellie forces her mind back to the present, kneeling on the quilt and easing Isaiah onto his back.

“Okay, buddy, what are we working with here? How bad’s the damage?”

He goes to his back docilely, one fist in his mouth, as she unpins his diaper. One pungent whiff tells her all she needs to know, and she makes her way hastily through cleaning him and re-diapering him in the pillowcase.

“Don’t crawl in the fireplace,” she says sternly. He looks up at her placidly, feet kicking, still chewing on his fist.

She stands up again, stifling a groan at her sore muscles, and walks out on the porch. She’s not going all the way to the outhouse to empty a diaper in a sleet storm, so she shakes the contents out into the bushes next to the porch and darts back inside. She blows out a breath of relief to see Isaiah right where she left him. The smell of tomato sauce now fills the small space and her stomach growls in anticipation.

After putting the diaper in another pot to soak and scrubbing her hands, wincing a bit as the water stings her new bite, she stirs the Chef Boyardee. Judging it warm enough, she spoons out a portion into a small bowl and mashes it up with the back of a spoon. She doesn’t have any bottles for Isaiah, but he can handle solid food if it’s mushy enough.

Sitting down at the kitchen table, a cautious faith spreads through her tired limbs, as though the spreading atmosphere of normalcy might just hold, more than welcome after the jittery fear of the last few hours. She holds Isaiah on her lap and patiently spoons the pasta mush into his mouth, scraping the bits off his chin that escape his lips and gently pushing them back into his mouth. He’s hungry enough not to put up much of a fight, and almost as soon as he’s finished, his eyes go heavy, blinking with exhaustion. After wiping his face and neck (no bib in sight, so the stains on his shirt will just have to stay) she builds him a nest on the quilt in front of the fire, and he conks out almost immediately.

She then tucks into the remainder of the ravioli with a vengeance, shoveling it into her mouth directly from the pot. No Joel to remind her to slow down—first time yet his absence has been an advantage.

Even though her body is leaden with fatigue, she makes herself go outside, a trip to the outhouse followed by checking the perimeter, just like Joel would. Then she builds herself a pallet of couch cushions between Isaiah and the fire. Lying with the fire warming her from behind, one hand on the gentle rise and fall of her cousin’s back, a thin thread of contentment unwinds across her scalp and down her spine, the tightness of her muscles slackening with relief. The winter wind howls outside the windows, held at bay by the solid cabin walls.

She did it. She got herself and Isaiah out of Jackson. They’re warm and safe and fed.

Joel would be proud. She can sleep now.

***

Ellie’s shoulders are a solid line of tension that stretches all the way down her back, her ears ringing with the volume of Isaiah’s cries. It’s mid-afternoon, and no matter how she rocks or bounces him, she can’t get him to settle for his nap. She knows her stress is winding him up even further, but she can’t think through the sound of his sobs and the heavy ache in her head.

The day had not gotten off to a good start. She’d been dreaming she was lying in a field next to Joel, looking up at the drifting clouds and pointing out the shapes they formed, when a mouse ran across her face. She batted it away, only to be jolted awake by a loud thunk and Isaiah’s scream. She shot up into a sitting position, lunging forward to catch him up in her arms, but the damage was done. Poor kid had just been trying to wake his sleeping cousin to play, and she’d knocked him for six.

After a tearful breakfast and a diaper change, she’d gotten him settled with a serving spoon and a pot, and he banged away while she tried to take stock of the day. Between washing and hanging soiled diapers—the pillowcases were thin and soaked through quickly—keeping them both fed, and keeping him busy and out of harm’s way, she’s run off her feet. Her body aches with a deep tiredness, and she can’t seem to draw on her usual well of endless energy. Kids are fucking tiring.

“Please, sweetheart, please let’s take a nap. You need it, and I hate to admit it, but I do too,” she says, rubbing Isaiah’s back as she sways side to side. Her infected bites have proved themselves to be particularly inconveniently located—turns out forearm, hand, and shoulder are all pretty key to childcare. They spike with pain every time she has to lift or carry something, which is fucking all the time.

After what seems like an eternity, Isaiah’s sobs dwindle into hiccuping sniffles, and she lies back on the cushionless bed of the couch with him snuggled under her chin, moving as slowly as possible to not jostle him. Her bones grate with pain, as though they no longer fit together properly, and she swipes a sheen of sweat off her upper lip with her unbitten forearm. Sleet pings against the windows, counterpoint to the pop and hiss of the logs in the fireplace, and she tries to let the calming sound fill her mind, hoping it will dim the sullen grind of her headache.

Just a little nap. That’s all they need. They’re okay.

***

They may not actually be okay.

By the next morning, their second in the cabin, Ellie’s infected bites are raised and red and burning like fire. A tight knot of pain lives behind her eyes and she has to admit her body aches seem worse than even her exertion in getting them to the cabin could explain. Isaiah now busy with his spoon and pot—thank God he’s not picky about his toys—she strips off her hoodie down to her tank top and cranes her neck to look at the bite on her shoulder.

Just like the ones on her forearm and hand, it has the telltale spirals of fungus winding out from the toothmarks. Are the tendrils under her skin growing? Is she actually infected? Three bites is a lot—she’d only been bitten once in the mall with Riley, and Joel had kept her safe from infected ever since then, regardless of her immunity.

She clenches her jaw and closes her eyes as shame floods over her once more. Joel had taught her better than this. She should have cleaned the bites the night they arrived at the cabin—there was a perfectly good first aid kit with antiseptic right next to the sink. But she’d been exhausted and overwhelmed and it hadn’t even crossed her mind.

Now she’s in big fucking trouble, because she can tell she’s sick. She brings the back of her hand to her cheek and then her forehead, and her fingers feel like ice against the burning skin of her face. She’s got a fever for sure, no need to even see if the first aid kit has a thermometer. Joel had told her that she had to keep herself safe so she could keep Isaiah safe, and she’s fucked it all up.

Is it just a regular infection from whatever gross and horrible germs lived on the infected’s yellowed, gnashing teeth? Or has her immunity been overpowered by the number of bites and she has honest to God cordyceps?

Only time will tell, but she needs to make some fucking arrangements here. There’s been no sign of Joel or Tommy coming to get them, and if she’s actually going to turn, she’s got to find a way to protect the baby. She looks out the window to the slate-gray sky spitting tiny snowflakes and bites her lip, but then shakes her head. She doesn’t dare get back in the rowboat and go back to Jackson—what if she turns while they’re on the water? Or they run right back into infected or raiders?

She pulls her hoodie back on, wincing as the fabric drags across the bites, and pushes down the icy fear that tries to crawl up her throat. She has one job: keep Isaiah safe. No matter what it fucking takes.

Time to get to work.

***

Ellie lies on the hard floor of the cabin where she’s fallen, Isaiah’s screams fading in and out of her hearing. She drags the pistol up from the back of her jeans with shaky hands and pushes it up under her chin, counting her heartbeats as they throb in her ears. Not much time left.

She’s counting on a surge of strength to tell her that she’s turned completely. Infected are strong as fuck, driven well past the threshold of human endurance by the fungus that controls them. She’s weak as water at the moment, so she’s betting she has a least a little bit more time. On her last trip to place a bowl of mashed up food in front of Isaiah in his cage, her knees had buckled, the ground rushing up to meet her. The bowl had shattered, the cold baked bean mush splattering across the floor, and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t get back up again.

Poor Isaiah. She’d cared for him as long as possible, scrutinizing herself for trembling hands or a suddenly short temper. The latter was tricky, because after three days marooned in a cabin with a fretful baby, watching herself get sicker and sicker, her nerves were shot. And Isaiah had access to neither his parents nor his bottles nor his cozy crib and favorite blanket. He cried a lot, and every time her irritation flared, she wondered if this was cordyceps taking over her brain.

When her hands start shaking, she builds an enclosure around Isaiah with every bit of furniture she can move in her weakened state. Sofa, kitchen table, even the mattress dragged off the bed and heaved over the top of the stacked kitchen chairs. It forms a cage even a determined eight-month-old can’t escape, and although it breaks her heart to see the tearful confusion on his face when he holds up his arms and she doesn’t pick him up, she doesn’t know how fast she’ll turn. She has to slow herself down long enough to take herself out before she bites Isaiah.

She’d considered offing herself early on the third day as her vision started going spotty any time she stood up and almost anything she ate came right back up. Her immunity had clearly bought her more time before turning completely than most people got, but she was getting worse by the hour. Her bites are now three white-hot circles of pain, oozing fluid through the cloths she’d tied over them, and red streaks climb her arms.

But even as she stared at the pistol in her hands, eyes burning like fiery coals in her head, Isaiah crawled up to her and tugged at the hem of her jeans with a chubby fist. Looking down at his upturned face and blinking back a sudden rush of tears, she firmed her wobbling lip and set the pistol back on the counter. She’d care for him as long as she possibly could, hoping against hope that Joel could get here in time.

In time before she turned? That didn’t seem likely. But maybe she could kill herself before she bit Isaiah, and the longer she can keep the baby fed and hydrated, the better shot he has at being rescued by his uncle or his father. Changing diapers through the tangle of wooden chair legs, shoving bowls of food and water into the cage for him, she pushes on through the waves of dizziness, not daring to penetrate the wall she’s placed between them.

But her last trip toward the cage had ended with her sprawled on her side, Isaiah’s desperate cries piercing her heart. She’d failed. She was supposed to keep him safe, and now either he’ll die when she bites him, or die from lack of care while her body rots, useless.

Tears leak over the bridge of her nose and drip onto the dusty cabin floor. A shiver bites into her frame, the hearth long cold since she lost the energy to lift the wood. She clutches the pistol with what’s left of her fading strength and closes her eyes, resolutely not thinking of Joel. If she lets her memories rise up in her mind’s eye, every time he laughed at her shitty jokes or held her after a nightmare, she’ll fall apart completely, and she has to stay strong. She has to stay focused, watching herself for the moment she transforms into a monster.

Her momentary chill gives way to another wave of heat bleeding through her bones, her throat dry, her tongue too large behind her teeth. The mouth of the pistol’s barrel is a blessedly cool circle on the underside of her chin. The sound of Isaiah’s sobs drifts farther and farther away.

Not much longer now.

***

Chapter Text

Things have indeed gotten much, much worse.

Having predicted this turn of events accurately is not a whole hell of a lot of consolation when there’s once again a stream of blood dripping down Joel’s face into the dirt.

This time he’s being dragged from the main square back to the town jail cell, the old bank vault, after being soundly beaten for the…seventh time? Eighth time? He’s not sure. It’s a hit to his dignity to be hauled back like a hogtied calf, the toes of his boots dragging in the dirt behind him while his head droops, but he neither provokes the men manhandling him nor tries to regain his feet. He’s playing the long game, and that means conserving energy wherever he can.

The raiders sling him back into the cell he’s been sharing with Tommy for the last three days, and Tommy just manages to cushion his fall, stretching out to the full length of the chain binding him to the bars of the window.

“All right, you idiot,” Tommy says as he eases Joel to the floor, propped up against his arm. The insult is meaningless when delivered with such affection and Joel shoots a half-hearted glare at his brother with his one good eye. The other is still swollen shut from an early punch, the first time he’d been staked out in the square by Pierce’s men. Tommy wets his handkerchief with a bit of their water ration and starts wiping away the blood from a cut over Joel’s eye in what’s become a depressingly familiar routine over the last few days.

“Keep your fool mouth shut this time?” Tommy asks, one eyebrow cocked at Joel as he takes stock of the new injuries.

“Didn’t say a word,” Joel says, working his jaw. Doesn’t seem broken. Good.

“Thank you,” Tommy says, his voice a choked tangle of gratitude and grief.

Pierce, the leader of the raiders, has been playing them against each other for the last three days, trying to get Maria’s location out of them. The first morning, Pierce had Tommy tied to a stake in the town square and told his men to have at him until he gave up his wife. Tommy responded with fiery rage and defiance no matter how many hits and kicks he took, and Pierce quickly realized the tactic was a dead end.

He then hit on the bright idea of torturing Joel in order to pressure Tommy into giving up Maria. Who does Tommy value more? His brother or his wife?

The afternoon of the first day, they brought Tommy out to watch, and he fought against his captors while Joel was beaten, shouting abuse at them, calling them cowards and dogs. Joel may have thrown in a few insults himself in solidarity between punches.

The morning of the second day, Pierce’s men came in and dragged Joel to his feet, wrapping a chain around Tommy’s waist and fixing it to the bars across the high window of the cell. Tommy looked at Joel with raw desperation in his eyes, and Joel nodded at him, jaw firm. He won’t give up Maria, no matter what.

Pierce had clearly wanted the psychological effect of Tommy hearing the beating but not seeing it, so Joel had shouted provocations at the raiders to let his brother know that he’s alive and kicking, spitting blood in their faces any time he had the opportunity. There was a round of beating every couple of hours, interspersed with endless stretches of standing in the icy rain, tied to a stake in the square. Joel tried to stay on his feet to preserve his pride, but by the late afternoon beating session, his voice was hoarse and weak and he couldn’t suppress his shivering.

That night, Tommy couldn’t muster a single joke as he tended Joel’s wounds, his lips compressed with helpless fury.

“We’re not giving her up,” Joel had said. “It’s not your fault, Tommy. We’re going to be okay, we just have to wait for our opening.”

The faith warring with fear in his brother’s eyes made Joel set his resolve even deeper, an anchor in his soul. Endure and survive, just like Ellie always says.

The fact that Maria has clearly still not been found is another lifeline to cling to. Jillian must still be hiding her, and no one else in town has broken ranks despite the daily public display of brutality designed to intimidate them.

Joel hadn’t bothered shouting today. He’s approaching the point of not being able to take advantage of any opportunity to escape that arises. He’s fifty-six years old. He had plenty of aches and pains before Pierce’s men started using him as a punching bag, and he needs to hoard his energy like gold. Ellie and Isaiah are waiting for him Outside.

And Tommy will never forgive himself if Joel dies protecting Maria.

Not that that’s a real possibility. Joel will be damned before he gives these clowns the satisfaction. He looks up at his brother’s face, worn thin by guilt and futility, and decides it’s time to assert his authority as big brother.

“Hey. They’re not going to win, you know that, right?” Joel says, pushing Tommy’s hand away and sitting up under his own power. He’s pretty proud of how he hides his wince at the screaming of his bruised—well, maybe cracked—ribs, until Tommy clenches his jaw and looks away.

“Yeah, I know they’re not going to win.” Tommy’s voice cracks and he cuffs one eye with his sleeve.

“Hey, asshole, listen to me,” Joel says, grabbing his brother’s forearm. His fingers have mostly regained circulation after being tied to a post all day, and his grip is almost its normal strength. “I’m not giving up, and you’d better fucking not either. Maria and the kids are counting on us. This ain’t the worst we’ve been through by a long shot.”

Tommy clears his throat and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

“Well, it’s pretty goddamn fucked from where I’m sitting. So you listen to me, big brother. You tell me if it gets bad. I know you’re a tough motherfucker, but I don’t know how much more of this you can take. If you think you’re getting close to…to something serious, you fucking tell me, and we…we figure something out. Because I’m not fucking doing this without you.”

Tommy’s eyes blaze at him, piercing even in the dim light of the cell, and Joel’s heart aches. It’s always easier being the one hurt than loving the one hurt.

“I promise you, Tommy, I’m nowhere near that point. You’re not getting rid of me that easy, and neither are these jackasses,” Joel says, trying to sound strong and convincing even through his hoarseness. An image rises up in his mind of hiding with Tommy in the hall closet when they were little boys, trying to avoid the swing of their stepfather’s belt. The words he’d said back then were different, but the promise was always the same: they were going to be okay. He would make it so, through sheer will and grit if he had to.

The same holds true today, and he wonders if Tommy’s mind has gone to the same memories when his eyes soften and the faintest quirk of a smile lifts the corner of his lip.

“All right, dumbass, let’s get some beauty sleep. God knows you could use it,” Tommy says.

Joel lies down back-to-back with Tommy on the cold floor of the cell, stifling a groan of pain at the movement, and savors the line of warmth of his brother against his spine. He huffs a breath of amusement at the thought that Ellie would no doubt have some stupid pun about Tommy having his back.

He just has to stay alive long enough to hear what she’d say.

***

Their opening, when it comes, is not engineered by Joel and Tommy at all.

The littlest Karaswami boy, five years old if Joel remembers rightly, comes running through the square mid-afternoon the next day. Joel sags in his bonds, the freezing mist draping a curtain of icy damp across his body, tickling maddeningly where it gathers in his beard.

The child runs toward him, and Joel shakes his head to warn him off, looking up to see if his mother, Mijra, is there to call him back. But the boy runs behind Joel and pauses for the briefest of moments before sprinting off to the other side of the square.

Leaving a small knife cradled in Joel’s bound hands.

Joel’s adrenaline sparks as he turns the knife in his fingers, careful not to drop it. Although he suddenly has the strength to stand up straight again, he remains slumped. Can’t give away his unexpected advantage.

Cut himself out of his bonds right now? Hide the knife in his jeans and use it to break Tommy out when he’s dragged back to the cell?

The choice is taken out of his hands when an unearthly shriek arises from north of the square, voices raised in a war cry accompanied by thundering hooves and some sort of…clanging?

Joel surges to his feet only to see an honest to God cavalry charge storm into Jackson Square.

Marilee Hornbeck, Esther Smith, Herbert Brownstone, Elmer Schafer, and dozens of others, not a single one below the age of seventy, come careening into the square on horseback, carrying actual torches and pitchforks. Behind each senior sits a small child, beating a pot with a spoon or shaking a cowbell.

Joel feels a disbelieving laugh escape his throat even as the cavalry charge makes its way around the square. Esther peels off at the first house, spurs her horse up onto the porch, and digs in her heels to make the horse rear up and kick down the door. Elmer, Marilee, and the others do the same at the succeeding doors, and soon the younger, more able-bodied Jacksonites come raging out of the houses, shedding ropes from their arms and fighting with the raiders who have clearly been caught flat-footed.

Pierce, complacent in the knowledge that no one had ammunition for firearms, must only have bothered to imprison those whom he considered a threat, young and middle-aged men and women. Big fucking mistake. The kids and the old folks are going to save them all. Seeing Herbert Brownstone stab a raider in the stomach with his pitchfork and then brain him with his torch, Joel wonders madly if they’ve mustered literal tar and feathers.

The half-hysterical thought jolts him back to reality. He realizes he’s still standing tied to a post like an idiot, and quickly begins sawing at his bindings.

Shaking the ropes off, he makes a beeline for the jail. Tommy must be going crazy hearing all this and wondering what the hell is happening. Kicking and punching his way across the square through the melee, Joel can’t help the grin that paints his face picturing Ellie and Isaiah in the Jackson Cavalry, but it quickly drops away. They’re not here. They’re Outside somewhere, all alone, going on four days now.

The elders clearly have the Battle of Jackson well in hand. He’s just seen Pierce lying on the ground with a pitchfork through the throat, and the tide has turned against the raiders. Joel isn’t needed here.

Get to Tommy, check on Maria, and then out to the north woods. It’s past time to bring their kids home.

***

“Thank God, thank God, thank God,” Tommy says, his boots heavy on the bedroom floor as he strides toward Maria, who’s awake and propped up by pillows on a bed in Jillian’s guestroom. Joel lingers in the doorway, watching Tommy take her face in his hands as though she’s made of glass, kissing her with his eyes closed in profound relief. Joel looks at the floor to give them a moment.

“Where’s Isaiah?”

Joel looks up again at the sound of Maria’s voice, weak but with a clear tinge of alarm. Tommy looks back at him, eyes wide, and he shakes his head with a twist to his mouth at their mutual sudden realization that Maria has no idea they sent the kids away.

Tommy turns back to her and takes both of her hands in his. She’s half-reclining, a grayish tinge to her skin beneath the massive bruise spreading out from her hairline, clearly still weak and just as clearly doing everything she can to appear strong and in control.

“He’s safe, with Ellie,” Tommy says. “We had to send them outside the wall.” Maria stiffens immediately, hands clenching around Tommy’s. Joel can see her struggle to summon calm as she takes a deep breath and releases it through pursed lips.

“Okay, I’ll hear you out. Tell me why that was the choice you made,” she says, voice carefully steady.

This is a husband-and-wife conversation, which is Joel’s cue to leave. He knocks on the doorframe.

“I’ll be out front when you’re ready,” he says to Tommy, who glances back with a nod before turning to Maria with the same air he used to have when he was sent to the principal’s office. Joel feels his mouth curve up as he shuts the door behind himself. They’ll work it out.

Joel makes his way back to the kitchen where Jillian is busy making notes on some kind of file. Medical record-keeping must be an ingrained habit even in the apocalypse, although Joel feels his eyebrows fold together at the worry that Maria’s condition might be serious enough to need documentation for further care.

“She going to be okay?” he asks, leaning against the kitchen counter. Jillian looks up.

“She will. She’s been awake most of today, and if I can get her to sleep and eat properly in between commanding the resistance of this entire damn town, she’ll be on her feet by the end of the week.”

Joel blows out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He and Maria are still building their relationship in many ways, finding their way around each other’s sore spots, but he respects her deeply and cares for her for Tommy’s sake.

“Commanding the resistance? Was she behind that cavalry charge in the square?” he asks, eyebrows raised. Jillian smirks, folding her arms across her chest with an air of satisfaction.

“Well, she and I both. The pots and pans and cowbells for the kids were my particular spin on the whole thing. Shock and awe, baby,” Jillian says, shining her fingernails on her shirt.

The ridiculous audacity combined with the ruthlessly efficient execution does seem very Jillian-and-Maria, and Joel can’t help his answering grin.

“You ever think about running for council?” he asks. She snorts immediately.

“No fucking thanks. I made the mistake of allowing myself to be put on a hospital governance board back in the Before, and swore after that to shoot my way out of any environment that uses Robert’s Rules of Order,” she says.

“Never cared much for parliamentary procedure myself,” Joel says, thinking of a few scrapes he and Tommy had handled with fist-based diplomacy. His ear picks up raised voices from the room Tommy and Maria are in, and his smile slides off his face. To business. “What do you have that will keep me on my feet?”

“On your feet?” Jillian says, amusement vanishing as she pushes back her chair and stands. “What injuries do you have? Do you need me to examine you? Treat anything?”

“Just painkillers,” Joel says, hands up. It’s taking all the patience he has to allow Tommy and Maria the time to hash things out. He wants to be outside the gates finding Ellie yesterday, and he’s in no mood to put up with medical meddling that will slow them down even further. What Jillian doesn’t know about how bad his injuries are won’t hurt her.

But he has to admit that he’s not going to be able to keep going without some kind of pharmaceutical assistance. Which reminds him of the variety and frequency with which he partook back in the QZ.

“I, uh, I may have a pretty high tolerance for most of what you’ve got,” he admits to Jillian, hunching his shoulders and looking at the floor before forcing himself to meet her gaze. He’s probably not the first person she’s dealt with since Outbreak Day who’s flirted with addiction. It’s been a pretty shitty twenty years for a lot of folks.

“I’m not giving you shit if you don’t have a damn good reason for why you have to stay on your feet, why you can’t get checked out and then rest like a normal person now that Jackson is ours again. If it’s male pride, you can fuck right off,” she says, arms folded and weight cocked on one hip.

“Ellie and Isaiah are outside the gates, and we have to go get them,” Joel says. He’ll go without the damn painkillers if he has to, but Jillian’s eyes soften immediately, something dark in the back of her gaze that speaks to a story he doesn’t know but doesn’t have time to ask about.

“Okay,” she says, dropping her defensive posture and walking over to a cabinet. Opening it, she raises up on her toes to drag a bottle down from the highest shelf, the orange plastic kind from Before with a faded printed prescription label still clinging to it. She taps out two pills into her cupped hand and places them into Joel’s palm.

“These are strong but won’t induce drowsiness,” she says, drawing him a glass of water. “They should last you about six hours, which hopefully is enough time to find your kids. I expect you to check in with me again when you get back, or at the clinic if they’ve got it re-opened.”

Joel knows better than to make promises he has no intention of keeping, but luckily, Tommy enters the kitchen and saves him from having to reply.

“You ready?” Joel asks, another surge of urgency burning through his limbs. Ellie’s name is repeating itself on a loop in his head, like an alarm that won’t shut off. Tommy nods.

“We had a meeting of the minds when she had to admit that in terms of putting kids in danger, sending them on a cavalry charge is pretty much on par with sending them Outside alone,” Tommy says. “Thanks for looking after her, Jillian.”

“On the house,” she says, opening the screen door for them. Joel nods his thanks to her, trying to hide how badly his whole body hurts just making his way down the back steps. The painkillers should kick in soon, and that plus adrenaline will get him on a horse and on his way to Ellie, although to be frank he would have done it on sheer cussedness alone if he had to.

The knowledge that he’s finally taking action to care for his girl slides something back into place inside of him. He’s felt disjointed and off-kilter ever since sending her off to fend for herself, capable as she is. It’s his job to look after her, and the whole world has been wrong since he abdicated that duty, even if it was to defend Jackson.

Having her back by his side is the only thing that can make the world right again.

***

Joel kneels in the ash of what used to be the northern hunting cabin, raw disbelief slicing through him like the cold wind that whips through the trees. Tommy stands next to him, hands on his hips, grim anxiety in every line of his body.

It had been a simple matter to saddle horses with the bare minimum of supplies after leaving Jillian’s house. Late afternoon was short in November and they spurred quickly out of the gates toward the north woods. The abandoned raiders’ encampment they found first was unsettling at best, but now to arrive at the cabin they’d sent their children to for refuge and find it a burned-out ruin sends a jolt of horror through Joel’s frame.

He plunges his hands into the ashes and then looks up at Tommy.

“No heat. This happened a few days ago, it’s not a recent burn. Where would they go?”

He tries to keep his voice calm as he dusts ashes off his hands. Overreacting won’t help Ellie and Isaiah.

“Depends on whether they were in the cabin when it burned,” Tommy says, speaking the terrible hypothetical Joel can’t bring himself to voice. “You don’t…you don’t see any bones, do you?”

Joel shoots to his feet in sheer reaction, then forces himself to take a breath. He makes his way through the ashen rubble, toeing aside debris and forcing himself to look carefully. If the kids are here, they need to find them and give them a proper burial.

“It looks to me like it was empty,” he says, looking up at Tommy and hoping he’s not succumbing to a parent’s desperate optimism. Tommy circles the far side of the ash field, and then turns back to Joel.

“I think you’re right. Should we try the southern cabin?” he asks, his own voice betraying his need to hold on to hope. Joel tries to place himself in Ellie’s shoes, and then shakes his head.

“Too far from here. Ellie’s smart enough to realize they couldn’t just hide in the woods, even with her go-bag. Isaiah’s too little for that in this weather.” Joel pauses, looking up at the scudding clouds overhead. “I’m betting she went for the fisherman’s cabin.”

Realization washes across Tommy’s face, then agreement.

“Let’s go,” Tommy says, tossing Joel’s reins to him before mounting his own gelding.

The infected that attack them in the lakeside woods are another horrifying twist that has Joel’s insides curdling even further with fear for Ellie and Isaiah. Imagining her out here alone, in the dark, trying to fend off a hoard of slavering monsters—it’s his worst nightmare. For the first time he wonders if she would have been safer staying in Jackson with him, bloodthirsty raiders and all.

In trying to save her, did he send his daughter away to die?

He shakes the thought away as another clicker charges toward him. It’s the work of muscle memory to slice, stab, and club the infected to death, easily manageable from horseback and even more routine in the practiced partnership he has with Tommy. The last clicker decapitated, the woods fall silent, and Joel wheels his horse toward the lakeshore, Tommy right behind him. When they get to the boulder they usually use as an anchor, the rowboat is nowhere to be seen, and he nods to himself.

“Looks like you were right, she went for the island,” Tommy confirms. “But we’ll need to ride up the shore to that old boathouse and find another boat. It’s too far for the horses to make the swim.”

Joel tightens his fists around his reins at yet another delay, but there’s no way around it. Tommy’s urgency matches his own, and in less time than Joel would have imagined, they’re pushing a rowboat out into the water. Joel steps toward the seat to row before being unceremoniously hauled back by the collar of his jacket.

“For fuck’s sake, Joel, you’ve just spent the last three days being beaten within an inch of your life. I’m rowing, you moron,” Tommy says, shoving Joel down into the opposite seat. Joel gives in with what he considers to be good grace, which means only a half-hearted glare at his brother.

“Just trying to keep my muscles warm,” he says. “Don’t want to stiffen up.”

“Well, fuck keeping your muscles warm, why don’t you keep your mouth shut instead and navigate for me,” Tommy huffs as he pulls on the oars, driving them out across the choppy lake in the wintry wind.

“Some fucking navigation if I’m not allowed to talk,” Joel retorts, the familiar bickering easing the stress that’s locked his shoulders into knots. Tommy’s doing it on purpose, he knows, to break the tension, and Joel loves him for it even as he hates how necessary it is. Tommy grins at him for a moment when he sees Joel has caught on, but then his attention turns inward as he focuses all his strength on rowing.

They’re only a few lengths from the island shore when Joel sees a shape bobbing toward them.

“Tommy, look,” he says, pointing. Tommy pauses mid-row and cranes around to follow Joel’s gaze.

“Fuck, is that the rowboat? Do you see the kids?” Tommy asks. Joel squints through the gathering gloom, hunching his shoulders against the cold air leaking down his collar.

“I don’t think so, but pull to starboard, let’s check,” Joel says.

It’s a matter of seconds before Joel is able to reach out and tug the rowboat up next to them, confirming that it’s empty both of children and supplies. Joel meets Tommy’s eyes, feeling his mouth turn down in bleak anticipation of what this might mean as their own boat rocks beneath them on the waves.

“You think they went overboard? Never made it to shore?” Tommy asks quietly. Joel closes his eyes, denial flooding his being, then opens them again.

“Ellie knows how to handle the boat. I can’t imagine why she would fall in. Let’s get to the cabin, they’re probably there, safe and sound,” Joel says, tone bracing. Let it be true. Please, let it be true.

When they splash out of the rowboat onto the beach, dragging it up behind them, Joel has indeed stiffened up almost to the point of immobility. He curses as he stumbles on the rocky ground, but Tommy’s hand is at his elbow immediately, steadying him. He doesn’t take time to acknowledge it, pushing up the hill toward the cabin, Tommy at his side.

They’re fifteen feet away from the cabin when they hear it—the unmistakable sound of a baby crying. A jolt shoots through Tommy’s body as they look at each other, confirming they both really heard it. Joel knows most of Isaiah’s cries, and this is not his tired or his hungry or his frustrated cry. It’s desolate, frantic, and they both sprint the last ten feet up the hill and onto the porch.

Tommy gets there a half-beat before him and crashes through the cabin door. Joel surges across the threshold behind him, into a scene that makes no sense.

Isaiah is trapped inside some strange tower of furniture, screaming, and Tommy immediately goes to him, flinging aside chairs to scoop the baby into his arms, hugging and shushing him.

Joel stands frozen in the doorway, blank shock flooding his body in a frigid wave.

Ellie lies sprawled across the floor, eyes closed, utterly still, one arm outflung and the other holding a pistol under her chin. A dark stain spreads on the floor beyond her head.

Joel’s knees give out and he collapses against the door frame, clinging to it with one hand as he doubles over. His ears are ringing. His vision is flickering. He’s drowning.

He did send his daughter away to die.

Joel can’t breathe.

But it doesn’t matter. He no longer has a reason to breathe.

***

Chapter Text

“-oel. Joel! Take the baby, take him!”

Tommy’s voice filters into Joel’s hearing from far away, barely reaching him through the visceral horror immobilizing his lungs. Eyes fixed on his motionless daughter, Joel sits askew on the floor where he slid down the side of the door frame, all strength drained from his limbs. But when a warm weight is pressed into his free arm, parental muscle memory takes over and his other arm comes up automatically to cradle Isaiah. The baby is still crying, undoubtedly picking up on the alarm and dread he and Tommy are broadcasting.

Tommy thuds to his knees on the floor next to Ellie and presses his hand to her pulse. Joel stifles a hoarse cry, muscles tensing to knock Tommy’s hand away. If his girl has finally found peace, no one is allowed to disturb it.

“Oh, Jesus fucking God,” Tommy says on an out-rush of breath, and Joel curls around Isaiah, certain his insides are dissolving, draining away into nothingness. He won’t need to shoot himself like he did when Sarah died, his body is just going to give up and give out under the shattering pain ripping through him.

“Joel! Joel, she’s alive, she’s breathing, look!”

Joel looks up, wondering why Tommy would hurt him with such a cruel falsehood.

“But Tommy, the—the blood—“ Joel can’t finish the sentence, can barely bring himself to look at the red-brown halo around her head on the floor. His throat locks tight as his voice breaks off. The snub shape of the pistol still in Ellie’s slack hand gleams with malevolence and he looks away.

Tommy leans across Ellie’s body and swipes his fingers through the dark stain surrounding her head, and another spasm of horror tears through Joel’s gut. How could Tommy be so disrespectful of Ellie’s last moments, to smear her blood around with his hands?

“It’s not blood, Joel, it’s some kind of food. Look, there’s the bowl, she must have dropped it when she passed out,” Tommy says, pointing to where indeed shards of porcelain litter the floor a foot away from Ellie’s head.

Feeling like a marionette with its strings cut, Joel bullies his limbs into action, scooting gracelessly across the floor to Ellie’s side. He’s lightheaded with shock even as his bones drag downward with the weight of black grief, but he’s never known Tommy to hurt him deliberately—he needs to find out for himself. If she’s truly gone, she deserves one last hug from him before he lays her in the earth.

Shoving Isaiah back into Tommy’s arms with what gentleness he can muster in his disjointed state, he slides a hand underneath Ellie’s neck and cradles her lolling head. As his fingers meet her hairline, he hauls a disbelieving breath in through his nose. She’s warm! He swings his gaze up to Tommy, eyes wide with shock, before immediately pressing the fingers of his other hand to her throat. It takes him a moment to feel her pulse through his numb trembling, but there it is: a regular thump, steady for all that it’s too fast.

His brief peak of adrenaline nosedives again and his strength slides out of his body on a torrent of disbelieving relief. He settles more fully onto the hard floor of the cabin, drawing her limp body up to his chest and dropping his head to inhale the unmistakable only-this-kid scent at the top of her head. His nose and lips rest in the softness of the hair at her crown, and his eyes clench shut on the burn of tears at the unspeakable comfort of his child breathing in his arms.

He hears his brother’s laugh for the first time in days, hoarse and broken, and looks up to see that Tommy’s eyes are wet as he cradles his own child close to him.

“They’re okay, big brother. We found them,” Tommy says, voice shaking but mouth upturned. Joel scrubs his sleeve across his eyes before wrapping his arm around Ellie again, feeling his own smile break across his face like the dawn.

He lets the world fade away for a moment, content to rock Ellie in his arms and thank any God who might ever have listened for the gift of this girl in his life, but reality slowly intrudes with troubling unanswered questions. He lowers Ellie from his embrace to rest in the crook of his arm and looks down into her face.

She’s shown no sign of waking despite being manhandled by both Tommy and him, and now that he’s able to pay more focused attention, that’s not the only thing that’s distinctly off. Her breathing is thin, weak, and twin flags of red paint her cheeks with an unnatural flush. He presses the backs of his fingers to her forehead and his heart sinks at the stinging heat of her skin. He looks up to Tommy, who’s checking Isaiah over in much the same manner.

“She’s got a bad fever,” he says, and Tommy looks back at him, resettling Isaiah, whose sobs have subsided to hiccuping sighs. “Yours okay?”

“He seems tired and hungry, but fine other than that. Did she pick up a cold or something?” Tommy asks, gathering his weight underneath him and propping Isaiah on his hip.

Joel looks back down and notices the bandages on her right arm and left hand for the first time, a frown pulling his eyebrows together. He unwinds the one on her hand and feels the breath punched out of him at the jagged toothmarks surrounded by familiar tendrils of fungus.

“She’s been bitten,” he says to Tommy, who freezes halfway to his feet and drops back down to one knee. “At least twice.”

“Shit. She must have run into those infected we took out,” Tommy replies, peering down at the bites. “Thank God she’s immune.”

“She may not have cordyceps, but these don’t look good,” Joel says, turning her arm over in his hands. The path of her veins up her arms, normally a pale blue, burns red in tracks stemming from the bites. Fever, shallow breath, unconsciousness, red streaks—it all points in one deadly direction: systemic infection.

“We need to get back, right now,” Joel says, forcing the words out as his chest tightens with fear. “This is turning into sepsis.”

Tommy looks at Joel for a moment, his own eyes troubled above his tightly compressed lips, mercifully not voicing the truth suddenly present in the room with them. Despite the horrifying tableau they had burst in on, Ellie had not killed herself (and as soon as she’s safe and well, they will be having a conversation about why she’d had a gun pointed at herself). Her immunity had protected her from being turned. But the infected may well be the death of her anyway from simple bacterial infection if they can’t get it turned around.

Tommy surges to his feet, snatching up the baby wrap and binding Isaiah to his body. Joel lays Ellie gently back on the floor and starts stuffing things back into her go-bag before slinging her rifle over his shoulder. In a moment, he’s stooping to gather her back in his arms and push to his feet.

“Joel, we can’t take her to the clinic,” Tommy says, holding open the cabin door for Joel as he turns sideways to carry Ellie through.

Joel freezes in the doorway for a moment at the delayed realization that of course they can’t. She’s been bitten by infected. The first person in Jackson who sees her will shoot on sight, and no doubt everyone is armed again now that the raiders have been driven out. He shakes his head and carefully makes his way down the porch steps. Her body is coal-hot against him, a terrifying contrast with the icy wind off the lake.

“Back to Jillian’s house, we’ll have a better chance there than at the clinic,” Joel says as he steps into the boat, Tommy right behind him, pushing off and then hopping in to sit at the oars, Isaiah snug against his chest. It won’t be safe, not by a long shot, but worst-case scenario, they can hold Jillian at gunpoint long enough to get care for Ellie. He hopes things won’t come to that, but Ellie needs treatment, now, and Joel’s got a better chance of convincing one nurse that she’s immune than an entire clinic staff. Maria will be there too, another voice of persuasion in their favor.

They shoot out onto the lake against the waves, moving as fast as they did on the way over, Tommy heaving at the oars like a man possessed. Joel’s heart skips a terror-filled beat at the proof that Tommy has realized how touch-and-go Ellie’s condition is. Every minute counts. He cradles her closer, trying to shield her from the cold spray and stabilize her against the pitch and roll of the boat.

“Hold on, baby girl. Just hold on,” he whispers.

His child is back at his side. But she still feels as far away as she did when he first sent her outside the wall.

***

Sneaking back into Jackson after a freezing rowboat journey followed by a jostling horseback ride makes for a hellish additional hour that Ellie spends untreated and, Joel fears, losing strength that she cannot spare. His parent sixth sense is screaming like a siren inside him, drowning out even the simple relief of making it to Jillian’s back steps. Tommy knocks perfunctorily and then strides in, again holding the door so Joel can carry Ellie through.

He lays Ellie on the kitchen table in an eerie echo of Tommy with Maria four days ago, and then steps in front of her as Jillian rushes into the kitchen, questions on her lips. He looks to Tommy, who is rapidly unwinding the baby wrap from around Isaiah, and Tommy nods back, jaw set.

“Let me get the baby to Maria and then we’ll get this sorted,” Tommy says, leaving the kitchen. Good choice—Isaiah and Maria deserve to be reunited, but more to the point, if this turns into a fight, Joel needs Tommy with his attention undivided and the baby safely away.

Jillian is washing her hands at the sink, ready to examine Ellie, and Joel draws a deep breath, deliberately opening his hands and trying to let the stress drain out of his frame. Clear, simple, and with as little violence as possible, that’s the goal for this conversation.

“Jillian, do you have any weapons in the kitchen?” he asks, voice level. She looks over at him from the sink, drying her hands, eyebrows raised.

“Shotgun hanging over the back door, knives in the knife block. That’s pretty much it. Why? Is she skittish around them? She’s not conscious, though, is she?” Jillian asks, trying to put the pieces together.

“Would you mind putting those in the living room?” Joel says, not really answering her question. She nods, likely assuming she was correct that they’d frighten Ellie, and lifts the gun down before gathering the knife block into the crook of her arm. Wrongheaded as that notion might be, Joel doesn’t care what she thinks if it keeps Ellie safe long enough to get treatment.

Jillian and Tommy re-enter the kitchen simultaneously, and Joel exchanges a look with Tommy. Joel steps to Ellie’s side, and Tommy stands next to Jillian, ready to restrain her if necessary.

“Okay, Jillian, you can see Ellie needs care, but I have to tell you something first, something that you’re likely going to find hard to believe,” Joel says.

He’d had plenty of time to think about how to break the news on the interminable journey back from the island, and he had decided to start with the evidence most likely to convince her. Careful not to dislodge the bandage on Ellie’s hand, he pushes up her sleeve to reveal her original infected bite from over a year ago, long healed.

Jillian starts back and Tommy’s hands hover behind her shoulders, ready to pull her back if she attacks or hold her in the kitchen if she goes for the weapons, but after her initial reaction, she leans closer, frowning.

“What is this?” she asks, curiosity warring with the expected revulsion in her tone.

“She’s immune. She was bitten eighteen months ago, and she didn’t turn. She’s immune to cordyceps,” Joel says, voice steady, one hand protectively on Ellie’s head.

Jillian looks up at him, mouth open.

“You’re shitting me. That’s not possible,” she replies.

“I’m not, and it is. Look. The bite is healed, and the fungus didn’t spread. You’ve seen her around town yourself. She’s not infected,” Joel counters.

“Holy shit,” Jillian breathes. “But this could mean—never mind, that’s clearly not what’s wrong with her at the moment, I can see she’s got a fever. Why tell me now?”

“Because of this,” Joel says, unwinding the bandage from her hand and revealing the raw infected bite, oozing pus, angry and inflamed.

Jillian sucks in another breath and goes rigid, and Tommy again steps close. She’s handling it pretty well so far, but it’s instinctive for pretty much everyone to immediately kill at the sight of a fresh bite.

“She’s immune to cordyceps, Jillian,” Joel says, keeping his voice low and calm. “It’s just a regular bacterial infection from an infected bite. But you can see it’s laying her low. She needs help, and if we take her to the clinic, people are going to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Jillian meets Joel’s eyes, searching his gaze, and her white-knuckled grip on her own elbows, arms across her middle, betrays her unease. Then she whooshes out a huge breath and presses her fingertips into her eye sockets.

“You Millers. Why the fuck can’t you people ever show up at my back door with something normal? You’ve got the leader of Jackson orchestrating an insurrection from my back bedroom and now a little girl immune to a world-ending plague. It’s too fucking much for one week!”

She shakes her head with a slightly hysterical laugh, but the tension has drained out of the room, and Joel feels his shoulders unlock. Jillian steps forward to unwind Ellie’s other bandage, and her lips tighten on a frown when she sees the red streaks up Ellie’s arms. Testing Ellie’s temperature with the back of her hand, her frown deepens in a way that has Joel’s shoulders tensing with dread again.

“Which of you has better stealth skills?” she asks, then interrupts herself. “Never mind. Tommy, you’re going to the clinic to steal antibiotics. They’re extremely fucking rare, so they’re hidden in top of the back closet behind the triage room. Normally I’d say she’s young enough to fight off a bacterial infection on her own, but this is too far gone. Joel, you’re going to help me get her into a lukewarm bath to try to bring down the fever. Move.”

Orders received, Tommy is out the back door with a quick squeeze to Joel’s shoulder. Joel gathers Ellie, still disturbingly still and silent and giving off heat like a furnace, back into his arms. One more hurdle crossed.

***

Ellie is drowning.

Freezing cold water surrounds her, dragging her down to the depths, and hands are holding her under, unfazed by her weak attempts to escape. She tries to force her eyes open, but she’s helpless against the weight of her eyelids, and she thrashes against the restraining hands. There are too many hands, and it’s too cold. She’s going to drown in the lake.

“Hold still, baby girl, we need to bring your fever down. You’re okay,” a voice says. She knows that voice. That voice is safe.

“I don’t—I don’t have a fever, I’m cold. I’m drowning in the lake,” she says, hating how feeble her voice sounds.

“That’s just the sickness, honey, making you think you’re cold. We’ve got you in a bath until your uncle can get back with some medicine,” a female voice says. The owner of the other hands?

With a herculean effort, Ellie forces her eyes open and Joel’s face emerges out of her daze. His eyes are frightened. That means danger, and she tries again to sit up, to help him with whatever is threatening them. Is he in the lake too? But frustratingly, he gently pushes her back down into the water, adjusting a cloth she’s just now noticing lies across her forehead. She looks down to see she’s clad only in her tank top and an unfamiliar pair of shorts.

“You need to lie still, baby,” he says. The lines around his eyes are tight and his mouth is turned down, which makes her own uneasiness ratchet even higher. She’s forgetting something, something important. She searches Joel’s face, the anxious frame of his eyebrows an ominous line above his dark eyes. Then it explodes into her awareness like a bolt of lightning through her muddled brain.

“Isaiah! Did I bite him?” she asks, trying to push herself up in what she now realizes is a bathtub, but sliding back down ineffectually. A wash of sudden understanding paints Joel’s face, and then his eyes refocus on her.

“No, baby girl, he’s just fine, you took care of him,” Joel says, wrapping an arm around her shoulders to support her weight, not seeming to care that he’s soaking his sleeve in the process.

“He’s alive?” she asks, wrapping her hand around Joel’s other wrist but unable to exert any actual force. Her bitten hand, arm, and shoulder pulse with agony as she struggles.

“He’s alive,” Joel affirms, warmth replacing the worry in his eyes for a moment. “You kept him safe and sound.”

It’s hard to believe, but if Joel says it, it must be true. The blessed relief that she didn’t kill her cousin drains the remaining scraps of energy out of her body like water out of a sieve, and her eyelids slide closed against her will.

“Speed and silence, Joel,” she says. The shivering pain and hurtful cold rise up in a wave that’s swallowing her, but she wants him to know how hard she tried.

“Speed and silence,” Joel agrees, tightening his arm around her shoulders. “You did great, baby. Can you stay awake? Ellie?”

But she can’t. The darkness drags her under.

***

It’s a long and annoying recovery, three days at Jillian’s house followed by two more on bedrest back at home as the infection slowly recedes. (Turns out antibiotic shots have to go in your butt cheek, and isn’t that some bullshit.) Joel watches her like a hawk, but that’s not what she finds herself chafing at the most.

It’s the fact that she doesn’t see Isaiah enough.

On her second day at Jillian’s (and Jillian has a way of doing medical stuff in a sort of nonchalant, irreverent way that makes Ellie decide she’s going to agitate to go to her instead of the clinic anytime she needs medical care from now on), Tommy comes in with Isaiah in his arms, Maria joining him to sit at the foot of her bed.

Maria looks a bit wobbly, and the bruising across her face spreading out from under the bandage on her head is scary-looking, but the familiar strength and command in her face is back, which goes a long way toward making things seem normal again. Apparently the raiders had been righteously owned by the old folks leading a cavalry charge while she and Isaiah were out on the island, and Ellie is frankly furious that she missed it. Pitchforks and torches? Fucking rad.

“Hey, kiddo,” Tommy says, Isaiah bright-eyed and bouncy in his hold. “We wanted to thank you for taking care of the baby. Looks like things really went south at the cabin and I know it had to have been hell even making it out there, but you kept him safe. You did great looking after him and we’re so grateful.” Maria nods and squeezes Ellie’s ankle with a small smile.

Ellie looks to Joel and sees a proud tilt to his upturned mustache where he sits in a kitchen chair next to her bed. But seeing Isaiah, healthy and happy now that he’s reunited with his parents and his baby blanket, isn’t enough. Her arms itch with the need to have his warm weight in her arms again.

“Can I hold him?” she asks, trying to sound strong and healthy and not in pain and weak as fuck. Tommy’s eyebrows go up, but he steps forward without protest and carefully decants the baby into her arms.

Isaiah greets her with a delighted babble, reaching up to grab at her hair, loose around her shoulders instead of in her usual ponytail since she’s imprisoned in bed all day. She presses her lips to his forehead, smelling his sweet baby smell and feeling the tangle of tension under her ribs smooth out.

She cradles him while the adults chat, savoring the feel of him in her arms, proof that she kept him safe and alive, proof that she didn’t turn and bite him or let him die of neglect. She didn’t let Joel and Tommy and Maria down. Her eyelids grow heavy—fuck these stupid infected bites stealing all her energy—but she protests every time they try to take him away from her.

She just…she just needs him near.

***

The fucked-up thing is that it doesn’t get better.

As soon as she’s back on her feet, she finds herself volunteering to babysit any time she can, searching for excuses to stop by Tommy and Maria’s house after school to see Isaiah, shoveling food down even faster than usual in the dining hall so she can push her plate aside and take him onto her lap at meals.

She jumps at every loud sound, certain some new terrible danger threatens that she needs to protect him from. She’s having trouble focusing in classes because she’s worried that something bad may be happening to Isaiah when she’s not there. She knows it’s fucking stupid—Tommy and Maria are way more capable of keeping him safe than she is—but she can’t seem to lay down this sense of fear and responsibility that eats away at her like acid in her bones.

It carries through into her dreams, where her fucked-up subconscious plunges her into a hideous array of nightmare scenarios, a cavalcade of bad things that could happen to an eight-month-old. Every night, she fights to keep him safe, and every night, she fails.

Joel has noticed. Of course he fucking has, and he, in his Joel way, has probed around the edges of her fake composure, asking her if she’s okay, holding her after every nightmare, offering to let her skip school if she needs more time to recover. But something inside her recoils every time she thinks about talking to him about it, and she doesn’t know why.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says one afternoon when she’s staring blankly at her homework at the kitchen table. She’s supposed to be diagramming sentences (fucking why? When will she need this?) but the temptation to shove her notebook away and head across the street to Tommy and Maria’s is climbing up her body like a choking vine.

She looks up and he’s leaning against the kitchen counter. From the way his arms are folded, jaw loose but shoulders tense, she can tell he’s halfway between “I’m going to let you deal with this at your own pace” and “you’re going to tell me what the fuck is going on right this minute.” She squeezes her hand around her pencil and then immediately regrets it when the bite on her forearm flares with pain.

“Is it the bites that are bothering you?” he asks. He must have seen the wince she thought she’d hidden. “I know it will be harder to keep four of them hidden than just one, but we’ll figure something out. I’ll keep you safe. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

His promise to make sure she’s safe, as earnest as it is, is abruptly the last straw. Her eyes burn and she slams her notebook shut. Her chair squeaks on the floor as she shoves it back, and she finds herself storming out of the kitchen and through the living room without a word to him.

The slam of the screen door behind her is too reminiscent of the fight they had before the raiders came, and her insides cramp with a mixed-up swirl of fury and grief that she can’t parse. Her feet accelerate from a fast walk to a stumbling jog to a run. Away, away, away.

She has to get away.

***

Joel keeps pace behind Ellie, not crowding her but not letting her out of his sight for an instant.

She’s bounced back physically from the infected bites in a way that still occasionally makes his knees turn watery with relief when it washes over him once again how close the fever came to taking her from him. But something has been eating away at her emotionally and he hasn’t been able to pry it out of her despite all his careful conversational overtures.

It’s not surprising that the ordeal she went through is having a traumatic effect, but he can’t help her until he understands which part of it is hurting her the most. When the first thing she’d asked when she woke in the bathtub, still burning with fever, was whether she’d bitten Isaiah, he’d had a window into what must have been a hellish wait in the cabin, three bites convincing her she was at risk of turning. The gun pressed under her chin had suddenly made a terrible kind of sense, and it kills him to know she’d been willing to end it all to protect Isaiah from herself. He aches with wanting to have been there to reassure her, but he wasn’t, and all he can do is try to be there for her now.

This morning she’d barely touched her breakfast, and the deeply out-of-character reticence to eat had pushed him into broaching a gentle confrontation after school. The fact that she couldn’t even engage with him, going directly for an escape route, has his parental radar pinging even louder.

He’ll let her run, but he won’t let her run away. He’s not leaving his girl to fight her battles alone.

He trails her to the second storehouse and follows her out of the bolt-hole, a bit surprised to see her leaving the walls. He’d have thought she’d want to stay in the safety of Jackson, once again secure if still a bit disjointed as the work to rebuild the houses the raiders had destroyed—and bury the dead—unfolds. But she jogs on through the fields and woods, and it doesn’t take him long to see where she’s headed: the lakeshore.

He knows she’s aware that he’s following her, but she doesn’t speak and he stays a respectful ten feet behind her. When they get to the lake, she steps into the rowboat without a word, and he unhitches the rope and takes up the oars. If she wants to go to the island, they’ll go to the island.

As they make their way across the windswept lake—and it’s fucking freezing out here, neither of them are wearing coats—she keeps her gaze fixed out across the water. He can’t read her expression, but her body is a tense ball where she sits huddled across from him, arms folded across her stomach and shoulders hunched. She looks so small and cold it’s an effort not to drop the oars and take her into his arms, but even though she’s asked to go to the cabin without words, the ask is clear all the same, and he’ll honor it.

She helps him drag the rowboat up the beach, and huffs out a breath of amusement when he hands her the rope to anchor it to a tree. He doesn’t get the joke, but when her solemnity returns almost immediately, he doesn’t ask, following her up to the cabin where they settle side-by-side on the porch steps. He waits, trying to infuse the silence with invitation.

“I don’t know what’s wrong, but my head is all fucked up,” she opens. He gazes out at the lake, a strand of relief unfurling across his shoulders. At least she’s willing to admit there’s a problem.

“Okay, let’s figure it out. What kind of fucked up? Can you find a word for it?” he asks. He glances over and she’s worrying at a loose thread on the bandage wrapped around her left hand.

“Scared,” she admits finally, her voice tinged with shame. “But not of the infected or the raiders.”

“Yeah? What are you scared of?” he returns, keeping his voice free of judgment.

“I’m scared Isaiah is going to get hurt, even though I know it’s stupid and he’s safe now, back with Tommy and Maria. It’s like everywhere I look there’s something bad that could happen to him, and if I can’t stop the bad things from hurting him, I…I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Joel watches the pine branches undulate in the wind and nods to himself. He’d seen her hyper-vigilance, but hadn’t twigged to the fact that it was connected to Isaiah specifically.

“Well, kiddo, you had an adult weight put on your shoulders in a seriously scary situation. There’s no way you should have had to be responsible for your cousin in a life-or-death scenario, and I’m sorry we couldn’t find another way. You handled it like a champ, but it makes sense that it’s hard to set that down now that the crisis is over,” Joel says.

He leans sideways toward her as close as he can without actually touching, leaving it to her whether she wants the physical contact but trying to radiate some warmth. She’s started to shiver, and he’s a step away from the same himself.

“I kind of get that. But there’s something else, something to do with you, underneath the fear. I can’t find it, I don’t know what the words are to say what it is, but it fucking hurts like a motherfucker,” she says, bringing the heels of her palms to her forehead, head ducked, elbows braced on her knees.

“To do with me?” he asks, feeling his forehead pleat in confusion. “Is it from our fight? Before the raiders came?”

She lowers her hands and looks at him, mouth dropping open in shocked realization, and then her face crumples. In an instant she’s on her feet, springing onto the porch and slugging the wall of the cabin next to the door.

“Fucking motherfucker! Goddamn fucking shit!” she screams, kicking and punching the unforgiving wood.

He’s so caught off-guard that he stares at her stupidly for a moment before leaping to his feet and hauling her away from the wall, arms around her waist. She fights him, sobbing and cursing.

“Ellie! Stop this! Stop, you’re going to hurt yourself!” he shouts. What the fuck is happening here?

She sags in his arms, the fight draining out of her as suddenly as it rose up, and he turns her around to take her in his arms properly. She cries like her heart is breaking, and he sways side-to-side, rocking her until the sobs start to subside. He pushes her back gently and looks down at her, wiping tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.

“What was that?” he asks, trying to keep the panic out of his voice but probably failing. “Talk to me.”

“Sarah,” she moans, lip still trembling. It startles him so badly he actually steps back from her, and a fresh flood of tears spills down her cheeks.

“What about Sarah?” he finds the wherewithal to ask, trying to regain his footing in the conversation. He tells himself to pull it together, to be there for Ellie, and steps forward again, putting his hands back on her shoulders.

“I just figured it out,” she says. “This horrible feeling that the world is going to kill the kid you’re trying to take care of, that’s what parents feel, every minute of every day.”

He hates to admit it, but she’s right, and he nods for her to go on.

“And—and you felt that with Sarah, and then the world did kill her. And I can’t stand it! I can’t stand that you’ve had that pain inside you this whole time. I just—I just can’t,” she says, cheeks wet.

It’s a sucker punch to the gut, and he sucks in a breath, his own eyes suddenly prickling. He can’t speak through the tightness in his throat, and doesn’t know what he’d say even if he could. This kid and her compassion and empathy. The strength with which she’d shouldered caring for Isaiah. A piercing ache slices through him at her newly adult understanding of what it means to care for a child, even though she’s still a child herself. As the cold wind whips around them on the porch, he fears for a moment that this whole thing may actually be his undoing.

He takes her back into his arms and leans down to kiss her head, letting her hiccupping sighs die down while he forces back the traitorous burning of his own eyes and searches for the right words. Finally he pushes her back again, smoothing back her hair when she turns her tear-stained face up to him.

“That’s not a burden you need to carry, baby girl. You are one hell of a capable kid, but you’re still a kid. You went above and beyond to care for Isaiah, and I’m so, so proud of you. I know it seems right now like it’s going to be hard to let go of feeling like you have to be his caregiver, but we’ll work on it together. And my feelings about Sarah are not your responsibility,” he says, squeezing her shoulders, trying to impress on her the truth of his words.

“Then why can’t I let go of it? Why does it hurt so bad?” she asks, sounding so desperately young as she begs him for answers.

“Because you’re a sweet and generous kid who cares for the people around her,” he says, shaking her gently when she immediately folds her arms over her chest and scowls at the ground. “I mean it, Ellie, and that’s not a weakness, it’s a gift.”

Her lip wobbles again at that, but after a moment she gives a reluctant nod and he lets go of her shoulders. She sneaks a look up at him and then ducks her head again, toeing at the porch floorboards. He lets the silence stretch. He can feel there’s more she needs to say.

“I get the patrol thing now,” she says, looking up at him from under her eyebrows.

He’s wrongfooted again. Although the details of their fight are still in the back of his mind, they’ve faded from importance. In the few moments he’s had to consider it, mostly while he’d sat by her bedside and tried to will her fever away, he’d been certain she’d make the case to go on patrol more vehemently than ever. She’s certainly more than proved her ability to fight infected and raiders and illness and all manner of disasters on her own over the last few days. At his ongoing speechlessness, she opens her mouth again, scrubbing the cuff of one sleeve across an eye.

“If this is how scary it is for you every time I’m in danger, I get why you want me to wait until I’m sixteen. I’ll wait. This pain and fear is bullshit and I don’t want you to have it about me. And…and I don’t want your Sarah-pain to hurt worse,” she finishes quietly, eyes falling back to the porch.

He’s dumbstruck. Awed.

“Ellie Williams, I love you." The words come spilling out of his mouth before he knows what he’s going to say.

Her head snaps up, eyes wide and mouth parted, but then her lips turn up and she throws her arms around him.

“Love you too,” she mumbles into his shirt front, and he feels his own smile bloom even as his eyes still stubbornly sting. This fucking kid. What a marvel she is.

“What do you say we go inside? Light a fire? Clean up the cabin a bit and warm up some food for dinner?” he asks, knowing that they’ve both gone about as deep emotionally as they have the strength for at the moment. He needs to get her warm and fed regardless.

She nods, still smiling, and swipes under her nose with her bandage. He makes a mental note to help her clean and change it before they go to sleep as he follows her into the cabin, her voice drifting back to him.

“I’ll share the Chef Boyardee with you, but I’m calling dibs on the last clean pillowcase,” she says, whatever that means. He shakes his head and closes the cabin door behind them, shutting out the bleak bite of winter’s early darkness with a sigh of relief.

Who knows what danger or catastrophe may come for them next, but for tonight, they’ll be safe and sheltered and warm.

They’ll be together.

And that's all he really needs.

***