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They charge towards the doors leading out to the theater’s lobby, Jesse just a few feet in front of her. Ellie takes in the angle of the door that Jesse’s headed for and knows that if he goes out that way, whoever's out there will have a clear shot at him. She doesn't have time to shout at him, so she pushes a little more speed into her legs, reaches forward, grabs his arm, and yanks him back hard with all her strength just as he shoves the door open.
Jesse stumbles backward as a bullet just barely misses his head. He and Ellie crouch down fast behind the ticket booth. Ellie’s breath comes fast as she stares at where the bullet embedded itself into the wall. If she hadn't grabbed Jesse, that bullet would have hit him. It would have gone straight into his head. Ellie would be staring over at his corpse on the ground, blood pouring from his head into the grimy lobby carpet that would be decorated with his brain matter. One of her best friends in the world would be dead. Because of her. Because he followed her here, he followed her on her quest for vengeance. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t want him to.
She presses her palms to the ground, desperately trying to push the image of his lifeless body from her mind. He's not dead, he's right behind her, alive, for now .
“Jesse?” she whispers, looking back at him, her voice shaking slightly as she tries to assure herself that he's okay.
He jerkily nods his head, eyes locked on the same bullet hole Ellie had been momentarily entranced by.
A voice yells out from behind the booth. “Stand up! Hands in the air, or I shoot this one!”
“Don’t you do it, Ellie! Jesse, get her out of here!” Tommy’s pained voice commands. Ellie knows it's Abby who's got Tommy. Abby, the girl who killed Joel, tortured him, bashed his head in with a golf club. Ellie can feel the anger, pain, and desperation boiling her blood, and all she wants to do is pop out from behind this stupid stand and kill this fucking bitch. But she can't, not with her gun pointed at Tommy, not with Jesse at her back, and definitely not with Dina too sick to defend herself back in the theater. She has to be smart about this.
“Stand up now!” Abby grates.
“Don’t you fucking dare–” Tommy calls, his voice desperate. Ellie can hear the shuffle of movement but can't see anything behind the counter.
“Shut the fuck up!” Abby screams, and Ellie hears Tommy groan after what sounds like something impacting with a body.
“Fuck.” Ellie looks around to see if there's anything she can do, but they're stuck. If she tries anything, Abby is going to kill Tommy. Ellie can't let that happen, she can't let another person die for her.
Abby bends down and points the gun closer to Tommy's head, finger moving to the trigger, “All right–”
“Stop, stop!” Ellie calls, popping up from behind the counter, gun, and hand held up in the air. Jesse hisses behind her, his hand grasping her leg, but she shakes him off.
“Toss your weapon,” Abby demands, mouth tight, voice low. Ellie pauses and Abby yells, “Toss your weapon!”
“Fuck!” Ellie throws her weapon onto the other side of the ticket counter. Ellie's eyes scan the room, and she sees a small kid off to the right dressed like one of those people from the woods. “Scars,” she thinks that’s what they called them. He’s got a bow drawn and pointed right at her.
“No... no…” Tommy gasps, hand on his stomach, eyes seeking out Ellie’s, pleading with her silently to go.
“Tell him to get up and toss his weapon, too,” Abby says, nodding to Jesse. Ellie turns her head back to him and nods slightly, lips pressed tight together. Jesse shakes his head frantically, eyes wide and burning with anger.
“Jesse fucking do it.” Ellie rasps, and Jesse sighs, shrugs his shoulders with frustration and stands up slowly, throwing his pistol next to Ellie’s and holding his hands up.
Ellie turns back to Abby and tries to hold her gaze, “I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me. There’s no cure because of me. I’m the one that you want,” she begs, words rushed. If she can just get Abby to leave, to let Tommy, Jesse, and Dina go, maybe she can save them all. “Just let them go.” Ellie gestures to Tommy and Jesse.
“You killed my friends…” Abby’s voice is tortured, broken. Ellie can see Tommy starting to tense up on the ground. She knows he’s going to try something, “We let you both live, and you wasted it!” Abby spits, lifting her gun from where it’s pointed at Tommy up to Ellie.
“Wait!” Ellie yells, diving down to the floor to stop Tommy, covering him with her body. Jesse dives back down behind the ticket stand, swearing as another bullet whizzes past his head. The kid shouts and points their arrow at Tommy and Ellie on the ground. Ellie holds her hand up towards Abby and pleads with her, “Please, please, I killed your friends. Neither of them had anything to do with it. Let them go, and I’ll go with you. You can do anything you want with me, but please let them go.”
Abby stares down at her gun pointed in Jesse’s direction, and the kid walks up to Abby’s shoulder, bow still drawn. “Abby?” he asks quietly, eyes sliding to hers for only a moment before looking back to Ellie. Abby looks between the three of them, then grits her teeth and flexes the fingers of her of her free hand.
“Fine,” she grates and motions her gun at Ellie. “Get up.”
“Ellie, no…” Tommy starts to stay, and she can feel him trying to move.
“Tommy, just fucking stop. Okay, stop. Get Jesse home,” She locks eyes with him while pushing down on his shoulders, keeping him pinned to the floor, and puts as much emphasis on Jesse’s name as she can, hoping he understands who she’s really talking about, “ Jesse needs to get home, please just do this for me.”
He finally pinches his eyes shut as if he’s in extreme pain and nods his head.
“Okay then,” she slowly pushes up from the floor as Abby and the kid take a step back.
“Lev, keep your bow on them,” Abby says to the kid, Lev. Then turns to Jesse and Tommy, “Don’t ever let me see either of you again. I do, and I kill her first.” She motions to Ellie with her gun. “Now you move, get that out of the way.” Abby points to the chair in front of the door. Ellie moves over to it and pulls it away from the handles. Abby’s behind her now, not so close that Ellie can turn and grab her, but not so far that Ellie can try and sprint away before Abby can get a shot off. Lev moves to Abby, and then the three of them are out the door. Abby reaches for Ellie’s arm and twists it up on her back in such a way that if Ellie tries to move in any way other than forward, she’ll be in excruciating pain.
“Move!” Abby yells, and then they are running into the night.
They put at least three blocks between themselves and the theater before Abby turns into a building. It looks like all the rest, dilapidated, overgrown, empty, but she seems to know where they’re going. They stumble down hallways, up staircases, and through rooms long abandoned. They don’t talk to one another. Abby grunts from time to time, pointing in one direction or the other, but that’s the only noise other than the sound of their own breaths. Ellie can feel her heart beating in her chest and she just prays that Tommy listens to her, that he doesn’t try to follow her out here.
With the rain, it’ll be hard to track them. Abby had made sure to stay on the pavement as much as possible, avoiding soil or mud unless it was their only choice. Once they’d gone into the buildings, the path they’d taken was winding, Ellie’s not even sure she could find her way out again if given the opportunity. It was like a maze in here.
Finally, after what feels like hours and two or three jumps from building to building, they stop. Abby pushes her away towards a chair in the corner. “Sit the fuck down.”
Ellie turns to face her, face tight, hands fisted at her side. “No fucking way. If you're gonna kill me, just do it.”
Abby reacts fast, far too fast for Ellie to put up a fight. She steps into Ellie’s space, hitting her with an elbow to her solar plexus and then a knee to her face as she doubles over. Ellie grunts and stumbles back, falling into the chair. Ellie has to hand it to Abby for all that she's huge she moves like Joel, quick and lethal.
“Fuck,” Ellie hisses as blood trickles down her face. Her nose stings like bitch, Ellie’s pretty sure it’s broken, and her eyes water making it hard for her to see.
“Stay down, or next time, I’ll break your arms.” Abby hisses, sliding her gun into her holster. The kid has already pulled out his bow and has it pointed at Ellie. They sit there for a few seconds as they each collect their breaths. Ellie takes off her overshirt and uses it to staunch the blood coming from her nose.
“So, if you're not going to kill me, what is your plan here? Are you going to torture me? Because if so, I don’t have anything to tell you, not that I would even if I did.”
“Oh, you would because I know where that theater is, and I can just go back there and take care of your friends. Pick them off as they're coming out of the fucking door. So stop with the tough guy act.” Abby seethes, her arms tensing and loosening as she paces the room. “But I don’t want anything from you; I know all I need to know about you.”
“Then why not just kill me already?” Ellie spits.
Abby spins, pulling her gun, and strides over to Ellie, her face thunderous. She shoves the gun against the side of Ellie’s head and grits her teeth. “Is that what you want? Do you want me to just blow your fucking brains out? Because I can. I can do it right fucking now.”
Ellie keeps her face hard. Eyes burning with hatred, lips pulled back in a snarl. “Do it!”
Abby presses the barrel of the gun into the flesh of Ellie’s head. Her breath comes out in heavy puffs across Ellie’s face, her body vibrating. Finally, she snarls and spins away, sliding her gun back into her holster. She paces back and forth, then stops. Her hands curl into fists, and she holds them pressed to the side of her head, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “Fuck. Fuck!” She bends over, bracing her hands on her knees, and screams until her voice cracks.
The kid stands in the far corner from her bow still up but not drawn. He looks at Abby, brows pulled down and lips flat. Ellie can see so many emotions swirling in his eyes, fear, worry, confusion, sorrow. Who is he? Why is he with Abby? Who the fuck is Abby?
“Why?” Ellie asks. The question that has been burning on her tongue for weeks, waiting to be uttered.
“Why what?” Abby croaks, voice horse.
“Why do you hate him so much?” Ellie asks, genuinely confused, “Like, I get it, okay, he stopped the cure from being made. He doomed the world.” Ellie pauses, closing her eyes at the image of Joel, bloody, broken, and beaten on that cold basement floor. “What you did it-it felt personal.”
Abby doesn’t say anything, her eyes burning.
“You knew someone in that hospital,” Ellie guesses. Abby flinches, her lips twitching, “He killed someone you loved. Who was it?”
“My dad,” Abby grits, the words sharp, cutting. Ellie reels back in her chair. “The doctor who was going to create the cure. He was the one that was going to do the procedure.”
“Joel killed your father?” Ellie asks incredulously.
“Yes.”
“So that’s why you came after him, why you came all that way, after all that time. Because he killed your dad.” Ellie's shocked, but something about it makes a sick sort of sense.
“He was my only family. He was everything to me, and he murdered him in cold blood.” Abby grates through her teeth. Turning and walking towards the window.
Ellie tilts her head and shrugs, “I would argue that it wasn’t cold blood.”
“He was unarmed! He wasn’t a soldier, he was a fucking doctor.”
“He was going to kill me.”
“So fucking what!” Abby screams, spinning to face Ellie.
Ellie puts up her hands palms out and says, matter of fact, “ So , Joel wasn’t okay with that.”
“What did it matter? You were only a job to him, cargo. Before Marlene gave you to him, you had never even met the man. Sure, you traveled together for what, six or seven months? You probably got close. I get that. But it still doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” Ellie huffs.
“You’re right I don’t. Even if he got close, even if he cared about you, you were the cure. Letting you die would have saved the world. All he had to do was let you die. He could have helped save the world. Why would he kill a whole hospital of people for you ? Why would he doom the world for you ? It’s not like you were his daughter.”
Ellie shakes her head. A cold, humorless laugh escapes her lips, “You really don’t get it. You just don’t . He didn’t care about the damn cure. He didn’t think the world could be saved, even if a cure was made.” Ellie plays with a loose thread on her sleeve, her eyes going hazy as her mind travels into the past. “On the way to the hospital, we came across people who were doing things… to other people like us just trying to survive, that would keep you up at night. If you’d bothered to ask Joel, he would ask how can you cure people like that.” Ellie sees the piece of a broken baseball bat lying bloody on the frozen ground. She sees a human ear, discarded under a butcher block, stained with the blood of who knows how many people. She hears the voice of a man calling her name, a voice that still haunts her dreams. She feels the press of his body over hers and the vibration of the knife on her palms as she hit, and hit, and hit, until there was nothing left of his face, just meat, blood, and bone. A full-body shudder travels through her, and Ellie has to dig her nails into her jeans and grit her teeth to keep from going into a full-blown panic attack. She takes deep, gasping breaths and presses the heel of her palm into her sternum, rubbing up and down slowly.
When Ellie speaks again, her voice is sad but steady, “But what you really just don’t seem to understand is that for Joel, he did save the world. His world . He saved me.” She sighs and looks at Abby, seeing a dawning realization pass across her face. “He couldn’t let another daughter die, not again. It wasn’t even a choice for him.”
Ellie hears a shuffle and she looks up to see the boy move closer to them, his eyes drawn to Ellie.
“So this man, the man that Abby killed. He was your father?” He inquires softly.
“Not by blood, no.” Ellie runs her hand over her tattoo, fingertips lingering on the bumps and hollows of the scar underneath. The moth stands out even in the dim light.
If somehow the lord gave me a second chance at that moment… I would do it all over again.
His words ring in her ears as she takes a deep breath, “But in every other way, yes, he was my father.”
“And you came here to kill Abby because she killed your father, and she killed him because he killed her father, and he killed her father because he was going to kill you?” The boy, Lev, asked.
Ellie looks at Abby, who’s staring at Lev, fingers gripping into her biceps, eyes shadowed by dim light from outside the window.
“Yes… I guess that’s about right.” Ellie suddenly feels the absurdity of Lev’s words, the ridiculousness of the actions that led them all here. But she’s done so much, killed so many, torn off little pieces of herself to get revenge for Joel’s death, how can she possibly let that go now?
After all we've been through... everything I've done... it can't be for nothing.
But there's no halfway with this. We finish what we started.
Her mind feels fuzzy as the words she’d spoken so long ago float back to her. She had been so young, so afraid, so desperate for her life to mean something . She would have done anything to achieve that, including letting herself die on that operating table. But what would it have really done for her? The things she experienced, the people she hurt, the people she lost, her death wouldn’t have changed any of it.
“I have no one now. My mother is dead by my hand after she tried to kill me. My sister is dead after giving her life to save me. Abby is all I have left. If you kill her, does that mean I would have to come after you to avenge her death?” Lev looks at the both of them, eyes shining, skin still damp from the rain. “When does it end? Who then would come for me?”
They sit in a heavy silence, the room stifling with dust and rot and time.
“Abby,” Lev says softly, carefully to her. Abby doesn't look up from the ground. “Abby.” His fingers just barely brush Abby's arm before she peels back with a growl.
“No. No. No ! She killed them… Mel an-and Owen. How can I just fucking let that go? Manny… it's…” Abby looks at Lev, her body slumping, defeated, her face a mix of despair and exhaustion. “They went there for me. They were my friends.”
Lev tentatively touches her shoulder, and her body sinks even more into itself. Ellie stays frozen in her chair, eyes still watering, the blood from her nose now only a small trickle.
“How will this help?” Lev asks, his words low. Ellie can tell they’re only really meant for Abby’s ears.
She knows she should probably keep her mouth shut. Anything she says here will only cut herself deeper into this girl’s grief. But this thing, this one thing, eats at her, and she has to get it out. “I didn’t know.”
“What?” Abby looks up, her eyes blank. Lev turns to Ellie. His brows pulled together, his fingers still resting softly on Abby's shoulder.
“I didn’t know about the baby until after. I wouldn’t have, at least I don’t think… Fuck I don’t know. I think if I’d known, I would have tried not to. Done something different.” Ellie struggles to express what she’s trying to say, her memory filled with the woman’s dead eyes, the blood pooling around her body, the taste of bile in the back of Ellie’s throat when she saw the swell of her stomach.
Abby’s face twists, her body tenses. Ellie’s ready for her to hit her, scream at her, fucking shoot her. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, Lev presses his other hand to her wrist, and it's like a magnet. Abby’s eyes travel down to his small hand, and the anger spills out of her. Her body stays straight and tight, but the burn inside her gaze fizzles away.
“Get out… just get out,” Abby’s voice is toneless, flat. The part inside Ellie that examines every interaction for a hidden meaning tells her it’s a trap. As soon as she stands up, Abby will strike, taking the blood she is so rightfully owed. But the part of Ellie that sees the world for what it puts on the surface, as broken and ugly as it sometimes is, knows that Abby’s done. Ellie could get up now and push it, drag back the hate, the despair, the violence, and Abby would probably welcome it. Punch Ellie in the face, break her arms or legs, beat her down into nothing, and then go back to the theater and finish what she started with Tommy, Jesse, Dina.
But Ellie’s just so fucking tired. She stands up, and without sparing them a glance, she leaves Abby and Lev behind.
It takes hours for Ellie to finally find her way out of the buildings, and when she does, the sun is already starting to creep over the horizon. She’s only gone a few feet when she hears a tread behind her, she would know anywhere. She’s heard it so many times in Jackson while working in the stables, grabbing her lunch, or just wandering around town.
“You okay, kiddo?” The voice is so similar for a moment, Ellie’s sure she’ll turn around, and Joel will be right there, with his sad eyes, his graying hair, his soft, tender smile. But the tone is just a little different, the drag on the vowels is just a little more pronounced. Tommy always did hang on to Texas a little harder than Joel.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be okay. Think my nose is fucking broken again , but otherwise, I should be okay.” Tommy comes to walk next to her, rifle in his hands. He looks relaxed, but Ellie knows it’s feigned. If the need arises, he will be ready in an instant. It comforts her to have his steady presence next to her, but it also rankles. “I told you not to come. I told you.”
“Sorry, you know I couldn’t do that. Joel would come back from the grave and kick my ass if Iet his little girl get herself killed.” Tommy shrugs his shoulder, eyes piercing as they travel over her skin. “They dead?”
“No, but they won’t be a problem, not anymore.” Ellie pauses to pull off her shoe. She got a rock in it at some point. Tommy moves closer so she can rest her free hand on him as she shakes it out and slips it back on. She puts her foot back on the ground and looks at Tommy, his face worn, tired, so much like Joel’s and yet so different too. “I’m sorry, Tommy, for dragging you into this.”
“Nah, ain't nothin’.”
“No, no, it was. You knew that Joel wouldn’t have wanted this. You tried to tell me. You came out here so that you could try and stop it before I got myself killed. You were willing to risk your life to save mine. Thank you.” Ellie kicks her foot into the dirt, her eyes locked on the tips of his stupid ass cowboy boots, the ones he wears everywhere. She hears him scoff and feels the weight of his eyes on the top of her head.
“It’s what ya do for family.” The words roll over her like honey. There was a time Ellie would have fought him on this. She’s not family. She’s not anyone’s family. But she knows that's not true anymore. She’s got an aunt and an uncle, she’s got a little cousin at home. She’s got Dina and this baby that’s coming, she’s got Jesse, and however, he’s gonna fit into all of this. She had a father who loved her so much he was willing to let the world burn. She’s got people on her side.
“Yeah, it is. C’mon, let's get back to Dina and Jesse. It’s time to go home.” Ellie reaches over and gives Tommy a quick hug around his middle. He holds still for a moment, then curves over her, a soft huff of breath rustles her hair. Then she’s pulling away and turning back to the theater.
Tommy follows behind her, adjusting his grip on his gun, and turns his face towards Jackson, towards home, and sucks in a deep breath of wet morning air, “Yeah, darlin’, I reckon it is.”