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Boston Quarantine Zone – February 10^th 2017

The glass in the window warps and rattles as sucker punches of wind and bomb blasts of snow pound at it and Tess is convinced it won’t last the night. It’s only got shitty single glazing, is hardly efficient at keeping the heat in and can barely stand up against what the Beaufort scale might classify as a “strong breeze”, never mind the cyclonic display going on out there. She’ll be laying in bed later tonight, trying to sleep and then, boom, shards of glass are gonna come flying across the living room.

Weather forecasts are a thing of the past, so there’s no way to tell the scale of this thing, but Tess would bet the entire Boston-Washington corridor is in much the same state. FEDRA keeps a couple of former meteorologists in its employ to operate any remaining weather stations and barely-functional radars, calculating and predicting the temperature, rainfall, barometric pressure and the like (the satellites they used to use to tell these things are useless now, just junk floating up in space) in order to plan accordingly: organize their guard patrols; put off body burning duty for another, drier day; postpone their sweeps of the sewers for Infected until a time when rainwater wasn’t causing them to overflow.

Meanwhile, on the street, you kind of just have to follow your instincts, like asking anyone with a hip replacement or pins in their arm if it’s starting to ache in anticipation of a cold snap, or noting that your hair feels more unmanageable in the humidity before a hot spell breaks with a summer thunderstorm.

Joel is usually pretty good at these kinds of things. During their time on the road, before Boston, he could tell what the weather for the day ahead would be like just from looking at the color of the sky at dusk or listening to how sound carries across a valley, even from something so trivial as whether the smoke from their campfire was rising vertically or horizontally.

He’s no dummy, but he’s badly underestimated this storm, Tess thinks ruefully.

She knows this one has to be bad, because FEDRA actually felt the need to inform the populace, had made announcements over loudspeaker in the last couple of days that the incoming storm “posed significant danger to life” and for everyone to take necessary precautions. Tape up their windows or block them with cardboard; stock up on water in the event of the pipes freezing; top floor inhabitants try and find shelter lower to ground, in case of roofs being ripped clean off or caving in under the weight of the snow. Curfew was being enforced at night anyway, but it had been heavily suggested to everyone to stay indoors during the daylight hours as well, only journeying outside if absolutely necessary. Usually, FEDRA isn’t too preoccupied when it comes to natural disasters and Tess doesn’t expect this concern for civilians to last. If there is any coastal flooding in the aftermath, they probably won’t make a concerted rescue effort – it suits them to have less mouths to feed. They’ll just cordon off the affected areas and get back to patrolling the streets for Fireflies.

The window pounds again and Tess jumps despite herself. Fuck. She’s already got her spare sweater on and extra socks, but it’s not doing much to keep goosebumps from rising along her arms or the sensation fleeing from her toes. She stomps her feet to try and get the circulation going, walks over to the window and squints outside, trying to see past the plumes of snowflakes kamikaze-swirling past, scratching at the glass like it’s a living thing that wants to get in.

The snow is already knee-deep, and icicles hang like fangs from doorways, windows and balconies. Streetlights hang like quivering orange orbs in the air, creating flickering pools of light underneath them. The powerlines swing nauseatingly and if the ice clusters too thickly on them and snaps any of them, they can kiss the electricity goodbye for two weeks until it’s fixed. Detritus goes hurtling along the streets, trashcans, plastic pedestrian barriers and crates blown away as easily as cotton wool. A garbage dumpster ambles along the sidewalk, its wheels propelled by the wind, eventually tipping over on to its side with a crash. Even the heavily fortified FEDRA vehicles are wobbling slightly. A tree thrashes like it’s possessed by the devil. The sky is a dark, seething brew of purplish-black thunderclouds, their underbellies occasionally glowing with lightning, fingers of electricity clawing across the sky. Tess can’t decide what’s louder, the growls of thunder rumbling above the city’s head or the high-pitched howl of the wind cutting sharp, skin-shredding paths through the streets. Even touching the glass of the window makes Tess’s fingertip burn from the cold.

The colloquial term for it is a “nor’easter.” They get them almost every year, usually between October and February. And Tess is used to harsh winters (she grew up in Detroit, after all, where schools closing for snow days and chains on truck tires and taking whole afternoons to shovel your driveway and icicles as long as your arm were the norm) but this really feels like one of those ones where the earth itself is pissed off and lashing out. As if Mother Nature didn’t give the human race a big enough “fuck you” when she unleashed Cordyceps on their oblivious asses fourteen years ago.

The window judders again and Tess’s anxiety thrums in her stomach like a bass string plucked. It’s been building for the last couple of hours, started out as anger but now it’s burned itself out, thickening and coagulating into a more oppressive, insidious emotion – fear. It’s not so much that she’s frightened of the windows not being able to withstand the storm, though that is a concern.  

It’s more so, the fact that somewhere, out there in this wild “significant danger to life, only journey outside if absolutely necessary” weather, Joel is conducting business and trying to put a bow on a deal that she and him have been working on all winter.

The whole thing is so fucking, ridiculously, head-poundingly stupid and Tess is wishing more than anything that she’d just told Jared Donovan to fuck off back at beginning of December, when they’d first made this deal.

He oversaw the South Boston Waterfront, his territory stretching from Fan Pier to the old Harpoon Brewery. He was a six-foot brute with thick, straw-blonde hair, a mean jut to his jaw and a scar over his left eye where it looked like someone had tried to slash it out with a knife, but he’d blinked just in time. He also had the biggest monopoly on ammo in the QZ. Tess is pretty sure he ends up selling most of it to the Fireflies – if he ever gets caught, he’ll be joining them on the gallows.

They’d had the misfortunate of getting entangled with him regarding an exchange of shotgun ammo for ration cards – six whole months’ worth of them. She and Joel didn’t often traffic in ammo for things bigger than handguns, so it was going to take them a while to wrangle together rounds for a shotgun. Their hopes had been pinned on Bill, but that had been a bust – he insisted he wasn’t parting with anything that he needed in a personal capacity, i.e., in case raiders decided to pay him and Frank a visit. Tess could understand that, but it still narrowed their options down considerably.

She ruled out their FEDRA contacts quickly. Most of them would never be persuaded to part with that kind of heavy-grade ammo (all those Fireflies and Infected to take out, after all. Tess had heard rumors that a Bloater had been seen ambling around the outside of the walls and it had taken thirteen rounds to get it down), not even for all the hydro in Boston. Not to mention that any attempt to barter with them for ammo that big ran the real risk of them being suspected of acquiring it for the Fireflies (this was the same reason they never trafficked in explosive materials) and land her and Joel in one of their enhanced interrogation rooms or worse.

With few other options, they’d spent weeks on end trying to procure it through other avenues, whilst also trying to keep on top of all their other pre-arranged trades and mandated shifts at whatever work FEDRA was throwing out. They’d tried with Sofia’s lot up at Copp’s Hill, operating out of the Old North Church, then with Walter’s gang that resided at Long Wharf. No luck. Every day they would go to Faneuil Hall, meandering through the marketplace, trying to catch snippets of whatever FEDRA was having shipped in this week or the next and what might soon be circulating through the smuggling chain. They’d put out feelers, let people know what they were on the hunt for and to report to them if they heard so much as a whisper.

The longer this had all dragged on for, December giving way to January and a whole new year, the more frustrated they’d grown, and the more impatient and bad-tempered Jared had gotten. He threatened to just give the ration cards to someone else, someone who could actually get him the goods, but Tess wanted them badly. She and Joel would keep enough to last them two or three months and set aside the rest to use as bargaining chips for other deals. It was good currency to have on hand. Back at the beginning, as per her M.O., she’d refused to agree to anything until she saw the stock with her own eyes, and Jared had shown her a shoebox crammed full of ration cards, even let her flick through them to make sure they were genuine and not counterfeit (Tess knew better than to inquire as to how Jared had come into their possession – how a man chooses to do business is none of hers). After that, she was determined that they would be hers and Joel’s.

So, maybe kind of stupidly considering how on edge things had gotten at their last meeting before the nor’easter had blown in, Tess had told Jared he could trust them to get it done.

“See that you do,” Jared had said in a low voice that made Tess think of wolves lurking in a dark forest. “Because if I’m feeling generous, I’ll just stiff you out of those cards, but make me look like a fool and you’ll be sorry.”

And Tess knew it. Jared didn’t do bluffing. She’d heard the stories, of how he could stomp on guys’ legs and break them like they were breadsticks, how he’d put this 24-year-old named Scott Cooper into a coma for the foolish mistake of mugging Jared’s sister, how the kid was still residing in what passed for a FEDRA-run assisted living facility, getting his meals through a tube up his nose. Jared was as ruthlessly efficient as Joel, but unlike Joel, Tess suspected that Jared took genuine enjoyment from hurting people and making them pay for failing him, loved anything that fed into his fearsome reputation and made people scurry away from him in fright and tremble at the mere mention of his name.

Tess would never have said so, but she considered this bad business practice. Most people knew that she and Joel could be just as cutthroat if they were crossed, but they weren’t so unreasonable that people swore off them entirely. Privately she thought that this kind of behavior would bite Jared in the ass one day and leave him with no more customers.

Instead, she’d given him a thin smile and said, “You don’t need to worry. We’ll turn them up eventually. Always do.”  

The whole thing made Joel intensely unhappy. He’d always disliked Jared and had made his complaints loud and clear to Tess about her deciding to do business with him. Just about every damned meeting ended with Joel muttering to her, “I don’t like this.”

“We’ve got an out,” Tess had reassured him. “Nothing’s been exchanged yet. If this doesn’t work out, long as we can keep on his good side, we can all just agree that it fell through. It happens all the time, you know it does.”

“Most people don’t hold that against you, though,” Joel said darkly. “He will.”

She knew he was just speaking the truth. More than he hated being stiffed, Jared hated anything that might put a dent in his reputation, anything that might make people wonder if he’d gone soft. And he’d quickly take steps to remind everyone that he was not soft. Probably by having her and Joel shanked in some place that was.

Tess had had a distant voice in her head that was piping up that maybe she’d bitten off more than she could chew here, but she’d kicked it into the void. They were committed. That was that.

Finally, towards the end of January, they’d had a breakthrough. Fucking Robert turned out to be their savior. He offered to be the middleman to some FEDRA rookie who could swipe an ammo box of shotgun shells from FEDRA’s reserves in exchange for a pound of hydro. And they’d had to give Robert himself six bottles of Canadian whiskey to sweeten the deal. But it was done. Tess could almost feel the ration cards in her hands, pictured herself flicking through them like the pages of a book.

And then the FEDRA rookie said he could only give them half and would deliver the rest of them in a fortnight.

Jared didn’t take it well.

They’d been in the warehouse on Drydock Avenue, their usual rendezvous point, to bring him the first half of the ammo. Tess hated that damn warehouse. Jared’s gang also traded in dogs. She and Joel would pass by cages full of pregnant, yipping bitches and whimpering, flea-covered pups and the warehouse always carried the musky reek of birthing fluids, membranes and discharge and blood. Even the men carried the smell on their hands.

As she’d explained the situation, the scar over Jared’s eye had flushed pink the more worked up he got, his entire face going red.

“I’ve already given you far longer than I would’ve given anyone else – out of respect, I might add – and now you’re telling me it’s gonna take even longer?” he’d seethed.

“It’s a fortnight,” Tess said wearily. “Surely a few shotgun shells aren’t a matter of urgency.”

“It is when I got clients who’ve been waiting on me for two months now and they’re just about ready to ditch me and get their ammo elsewhere,’ Jared snarled. “I’m not having some upstart taking business away from me just because my supply line is too fucking slow.”

“You’re a smuggler,” Tess said, trying to sound patient. “Negotiate. You’ve got half the ammo already, so give them their first instalments as a show of good faith, then give them an accurate E.T.A. for the next one.”

“You know as well as I do that sometimes a couple of days can make all the difference,” Jared muttered. “You’re not the only ones who stand to lose out on a big payday here.”

“And what did Marlene promise you?” Tess asked, trying not to let irritation bleed into her voice. When he’d snorted, she added, “C’mon, Jared, everyone in Boston knows she’s your biggest customer. Don’t expect me to believe that you’re afraid of reprisal from her lot.”

In hindsight, that might’ve been the wrong thing to say.

“I ain’t afraid of those fuckin’ Fireflies,” Jared hissed. “And I got far more important clients than that bitch. They don’t wait forever, and I didn’t get to be on top by being tardy. And I’m not about to be kicked downstairs by the likes of you two.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Tess had seen Joel’s fist twitch menacingly at his side, while some of Jared’s men, skulking behind their boss, had tightened their fingers around crowbars and pipe wrenches, their hands drifting closer to the holsters in their belts, predatory grins of anticipation on their faces.

Tess had kept a lid on her nervousness, but inside she was starting to wonder if she’d spectacularly misjudged this whole thing. She and Joel had made a name for themselves, but they were still just a two-person operation. Whereas Jared had a gang of about fifteen to back him up. She was in no doubt about who would emerge the loser if Jared decided to rake them across the coals.

“Fine,” she said wearily. “I’ll see if there’s any way we can speed things up.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Servopoulos,” Jared warned.

“Noted,” Tess said, so fucking sick of all this that the words Fuck this were playing on an infinite loop in her mind. “So, are we done here?”

“Sure. I don’t want to look at your faces for another fucking second,” Jared growled. “I’ll give you an hour to get out of my territory today and then I’ll give you till midnight on the 10^th.”

“Oh, come on. The 10^th is just a week from now,” Tess protested.

“I think you guys are capable of delivering on time,” Jared said, a mean little smile suddenly crossing his face. “C’mon, Tess. You’ve got bargaining skills I’ll never have, after all. Been a cold winter – maybe your FEDRA guy will expedite the process if you agree to warm his bed.”

Joel, who’d been silent up until this point, had snarled, “Say that again, motherfucker”, but Tess had put her hand on his arm and tightened her grip painfully, glaring at him and stopping him in his tracks. In their usual circles, she commanded too much respect for people to dare make that kind of suggestion to her face, but by this point she was too exhausted to care.

“Let’s just go,” she said to him in a fierce undertone.

They’d turned to leave, marching towards the warehouse doors. As soon as they were about to exit, the tense silence had suddenly been split by the sound of a gunshot ringing out, the bang echoing all throughout the warehouse. Tess had immediately ducked, feeling Joel instinctively duck over her. Over the sound of her ears ringing, she’d heard him reach for his holster, pulling his revolver out, the click of the safety turning off as he’d pointed it back towards Jared and his gang.

Heart racing, Tess had frantically patted herself down, trying to force the shock aside and see if she felt pain anywhere. But she was fine. Her eyes had then roved across Joel’s body, looking for dark stains blooming over his clothes. Nothing.

Tess turned back around, wondering if Jared was fucking with them, playing target practice and deliberately missing just to make them shit their pants. But he was aiming his gun towards the roof, had fired skyward, only startling a few seagulls.

The look on his face was outwardly expressionless, but Tess could read the dark intention in his eyes.

Next time it’ll be in your head.

Joel had helped Tess to her feet, without lowering his gun. He kept it pointed at Jared until they were out of the warehouse. He didn’t holster it until they were out of the South Boston Waterfront.

“Fuckin’ psycho. You shoulda just let me take him out there and then,” Joel had seethed later that night, as they tried to drown their frustration and anxiety with a couple of fingers’ worth of Scotch.

“What, and leave ourselves wide open for his underlings to do their own variation of the Blackfriars Massacre?” Tess had huffed.

“Whole of Boston would probably thank us,” Joel muttered.

“But not his big important clients that he can’t keep waiting,” Tess said impatiently. “Jared already hates us, I don’t want him going around badmouthing us to other parties that might wanna make life harder for us.”

Joel had snorted dismissively. “He’s probably just makin’ that shit up, so he can sound all big and important.”

“We can’t take that chance,” Tess sighed, swirling her Scotch in her glass. “Look. I started all this, so I’m gonna finish this.”

“How?” Joel had asked, sounding gloomy. He’s always been more prone to pessimism than she is.

She’d sighed, swallowing the last of her Scotch, feeling it burn all the way down.

“Guess we find go and find out Robert’s asking price for cutting down the time frame, and hope he’ll hear us out.”

That week had been tense. Joel had refused to let Tess go out unaccompanied, lest Jared send out one of his men to jump her (or worse), to send a message. Tess had decided that she wasn’t going to be frightened by Jared, but she was beginning to get worried about how much more of this Joel could take before he potentially decided “fuck it” and took Jared out to definitively put an end to the matter entirely.

Thankfully, Robert played nice, after being plied with a twenty-two-year-old bottle of Johnnie Walker (“Don’t drink it all at once,” Tess had told him, only half-kidding). Another pound of hydro later and the FEDRA rookie was able to get them the second lot of shotgun shells, a day before the deadline. The plan had been to get the shipment to Jared and collect their pay, both her and Joel looking forward to putting this whole fucking business behind them at long last.

And then a fucking nor’easter had blown in.

At first the two of them agreed to just wrap up warm and tough it out, make the journey to their usual meeting spot. They didn’t usually let the snow stop them from conducting business in winter. But the weather had turned beastly in just a couple of hours, practically all of Boston ducking for cover and huddling indoors to wait it out. Even FEDRA had abandoned their posts on the walls to hunker down. Tess pondered which was more likely to kill them, blizzard or Jared, and grudgingly concluded that they should wait out the storm and go to the Waterfront the minute the snow and wind let up.

Joel disagreed. He tried to downplay the storm’s severity, reminding Tess that they’d survived worse blizzards during their years surviving outside the QZ’s walls. Tess could tell that this was his anxiety over Jared talking, because only his anxiety reaching breaking point would make him contemplate attempting to do something that suicidal.  

“We survived worse blizzards because we weren’t dumb enough to be walking outside around in them,” she’d pointed out.

“It won’t be as bad in the city. We can cut through buildings, take the underground route, stay outta the wind,” Joel insisted.

“It’s not worth it,” Tess said, losing patience with how uncharacteristically cavalier he was being.

Back before Outbreak Day, it would’ve been a pleasant half-hour stroll from Downtown to the Waterfront, at least according to people who’d lived in Boston all their lives. Now it takes over an hour to get there and an hour to get back, heading down the Interstate 93, over the Summer Street bridge and then down towards the docks. And that’s on a balmy summer day. There’s FEDRA checkpoints to slip past, but she’d bet that Joel had been hoping that they’d given up on manning those tonight in light of the weather conditions. Some areas are still inaccessible because Outbreak Day hit while the Big Dig project was still ongoing, leaving roads cut off and impassable trenches dug into the earth. Obstacles like that that could hold them up as much as the weather. It’s a network of buildings to cut through, planks to navigate over drops and sewer passages to descend through. The whole endeavor sounded like a death trap in these conditions, and she said as much.

“You know what Jared’s like. What he’ll do. And you’ll be the one he comes after,” Joel said stubbornly. “I’m not gonna give him the excuse.”

“He won’t even be there! He’ll be hunkering down, just like everyone else,” Tess argued.

“Can’t risk that he won’t be,” Joel muttered. “He might just be crazy enough to be waitin’ on us.”

“Joel, look at it out there.” Tess had pointed at the window, where outside wind was screeching in fresh off the sea and snow was swarming like hornets and the sky was booming like a wrathful god. “We’ll never make it. I’d rather take my chances with Jared tomorrow than go out there and freeze to death.”

Joel had stared at her for a long moment, working his jaw, thoughts visibly racing through his head and some guarded emotion glistening in his eyes.

“I’ll do it,” he said gruffly.

“You fucking won’t,” Tess snapped.

“He never said we both had to show up, just that we got the trade done by midnight tonight. He wants the fuckin’ ammo, he can have it,” Joel said, already crossing the room to pick up his backpack.

“Even if there wasn’t a fucking blizzard out there, there’s no way I’d let you go it alone,” Tess growled.

“I’ll be fine. We’ve shown up to deals alone before, ain’t like it’s considered bad manners, so long as the transaction goes through. They ain’t gonna touch me,” Joel said, not looking at her, too busy cramming the ammo box into his backpack, seemingly not caring that it looked bulky and conspicuous.

Tess realized that that old fear of hers had resurfaced, the fear that came out in moments like this, when Joel went beyond just being stubborn and made it clear that he didn’t give a shit if he lived or died. She only has to think about what happened to him on Outbreak Day and she knows in her bones that, much as he still has a couple of people tethering him to this world, providing him with some meager sense of purpose, there’s still some deeper, hidden part of him that doesn’t care and won’t fight the end when it comes because he’s ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Ready to go be with his daughter.

“Joel,” Tess had said tersely and when he still wouldn’t look at her, she’d sunk steel into her tone. “Joel.”

He finished zipping his backpack and finally looked at her, determination still writ large on his stupid face.

“I get it. It’s a setback none of us wanted,” Tess said calmly, using her “negotiator” voice. “But this storm is out of our control, and even he has to know it. You go out there alone, you’re putting yourself at risk when he might not even be waiting for you on the other end. Let’s just wait till morning, see if it clears up. Then we’ll go find Jared.”

“Snow might be too deep to traverse by then,” Joel said, shaking his head and crossing the room again, picking his jacket up from the back of a chair.

Tess could’ve hit her head against a wall at this version of Joel who suddenly had an answer for everything. Normally, she was good at getting him to listen to her. But this time she could tell that that thing was overtaking him, the restlessness, the fear that he tries to hide from everyone else but can’t hide from her. That gremlin inside him that sometimes has him lying awake at night or leaning against a wall, hand rubbing a circle on his chest, right above his heart, while she tells him to take a breath. It was a fear that was always most viciously stoked when he was afraid that someone he felt responsible for was in danger. This anxiety over Jared and what he might do to her had been growing inside of him for weeks now, probably infesting his entire mind by this point and when it reached this point, it could make him do stupid shit. Like this.

Nine times out of ten she can rein him in, but she hadn’t been able to tonight.

“You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting Jared get in your head,” she’d said, getting angry at last, as Joel zipped up his jacket, shucked his backpack on, started walking towards the door. She threw out every excuse she could think of. “It’s too far to travel, and even if wasn’t storming, FEDRA might still be snooping around.”

She knew she was scraping the bottom of the barrel with that one. FEDRA had never stopped them before. Sure enough, Joel just snorted.

“Them? Nah, they’re holin’ up somewhere warm while the rest of the city fuckin’ freezes. And when they’re hidin’ away is the best time to do a deal. You know it and I bet Jared knows that.”

By this point, Tess was sensing that the fight was lost. So she resorted to something she almost never did – pleading.  

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she’d said quietly, voicing her fears aloud, giving herself over to open vulnerability. “Don’t do this. Stay, and we’ll figure this out. Please, Joel.”

Joel paused, his hand flexing around the door handle, and she thought she saw a crack in his resolve, his eyes softening. She was hoping for him to sigh and mutter a curse word in resignation, drop the backpack on the floor. But it only lasted for a moment, and she saw that stony gleam return to his eyes. His mind was made up.

He was gone, with a promise to be back in three hours, max. It’s been more like five now and the sun has gone down, and Tess is trying very hard to not let herself think of Joel frozen stiff and lifeless in the snow like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. To be fair to him, the weather hadn’t been as bad as this when he’d left. But the fact that he’s still out there now, in this, is giving her a very bad feeling. 

She’d wanted him to give up and turn back. She wanted the elements to have caused some structural damage, maybe a rockfall or an enormous sinkhole opening up in the ground and creating an impassable barrier along their usual route. She’d wanted the visibility to be so poor and the wind so loud that he had no choice but to admit defeat. She wanted him to turn up at the door with a scowl on his face and the ammo still in his possession, cold but still alive.

But time had just kept ticking on, the three-hour mark coming and going, with still no sign of Joel. Her anger has given way to anxiety, chewing away at her guts, and now Tess can’t keep still, moving around from the kitchen table to the window to the bedroom and back again. She tries fiddling with the radio to see if she can hear anything out there, but there’s nothing, just the growl of static. She hopes Frank and Bill are okay. No doubt Bill’s got them hunkered down somewhere warm and secluded, plenty of blankets and homemade soup and hot water, no violent and spiteful customers to worry about.

The alarm clock on the bedside table has just passed eleven pm. Tess’s thoughts keep going in a circle.

I told you not to, you fucker. Why do you have to be like this? Why do you always have to be the one to take the fall?

She sits at the kitchen table, her finger finding its way to her mouth, gnawing at a hangnail for comfort, staring towards the window again, wondering if she should get up and sit vigil next to it, peer down into the street to keep an eye out for Joel, watching for his return.

He’s okay. He’s okay. He has to be. He’s being stupid right now, but his survival instincts are still strong. He’s fine. It’s just bad weather. He’s just being careful, taking his time. He’s gonna be okay, he’ll be back any minute…

It’s times like this when Tess really misses the instant communication of working phones. She could just call him and ask how it’s going, hear his voice and release some of this anxiety from her, like letting the steam out of a pressure cooker. Alternatively, she could’ve made a phone call to the docks and told Jared, “Weather’s a bitch, see you tomorrow” and she and Joel could be tucked up in bed right now. Typically, in situations where something had come up last minute and she’d had to delay a meetup, she’d bribe someone with ration cards to pass along a message, but the streets are deserted. Everything, even Jared’s big time payday deal, will have ground to a halt. But Joel just refused to believe it.

What if something happens to him out there that’s not a consequence of the weather? Suppose he does run into a FEDRA officer, and they correctly assume that anyone mad enough to be outside during a blizzard must be up to no good. Or an Infected, even though a temperature plunge like this usually renders them inert and sluggish, the underground mycelium networks shriveled and slow on the uptake from the deep freeze

And that’s without even getting into all the ways it could go wrong if Jared and his goons actually do show up for the rendezvous. She feels another flash of anger at Joel for making himself so vulnerable. Any one of those fuckers would want to have bragging rights about having taken out Joel Miller.

You stubborn, stupid, self-centered idiot. You might not give a flying fuck about what happens to you but I –

A knocking sound at the door jerks Tess from her thoughts, making her jump. At first, she’s thinking that the window in the stairwell outside has been shattered and the wind is going to come down the hallway and make every door on their floor rattle all night long. But then it comes again, most heavily, insistently and a voice shouts out:

“Tess! You in there?”

It’s not Joel – he has his key. Tess recognizes the voice, but the name escapes her at the moment. She goes over to the door and opens it, taken aback by the sight that greets her.

It’s Edwin Abbott. He floats around in their smuggling circle, dipping his toe in from time to time, but not quite able to get as down and dirty as her and Joel – he’s got two kids to think about. As far as Tess knows, he’s been careful and discreet enough to never get on the bad side of people like Jared or Robert and, honestly, she envies him a little for that. He’s no kingpin but he’s got an in with a female FEDRA guard who he knew before Outbreak Day, can sometimes get his hands on vegetable seeds or tobacco or revolver bullets. He’s reliable, he’s cordial, he can be trusted to make an honest trade.

And right now, he’s struggling to hold a soaking wet and violently shivering Joel upright.

“Oh, shit…” Tess can’t help the words from coming out, expelled in a groan that’s as much exasperation as it is relief.

“Hey, Tess,” Edwin says breathlessly. “Think I found somethin' of yours.”

“Edwin, I…what the hell happened?” Tess asks, though the answer is pretty self-explanatory.

“I passed him by in the street,” Edwin explains hastily. “Hawley, just around the block. He was leanin' against a lamppost, could barely walk, so I got him up and took him the rest of the way. He’s lucky – nobody else is takin’ their chances in this weather, least of all FEDRA.”

Hearing that makes renewed anger bloom inside of Tess. If Joel headed out there only to find nobody at the rendezvous because of course they weren’t, the weather isn’t playing ball, she’ll kill him herself if he doesn’t succumb to hypothermia first.

The word passes through her head almost jokingly at first, but when Tess takes a good look at Joel, it repeats itself, deadly serious this time. Hypothermia.

He looks really bad. His clothes are almost translucent with dampness, his jacket crusted with a fine patina of snow, his boots caked in it, hair plastered to his scalp. He’s struggling to stand, his legs trembling like a baby deer’s, his arm slung around Edwin’s shoulders while the other man has his arm wrapped around Joel’s waist, trying to hold him up by his ribcage. He’s not even able to look up at her, his head drooped in exhaustion. He looks about two seconds away from collapsing to the floor.

Fuck. Tess reaches forward, cups Joel’s cheeks (Jesus, he’s ice-cold) and lifts his head up to look at her. She can feel the vibrations from his chattering teeth shimmying all the way up to her elbows and his eyes look flat and glazed over, which sets anxiety snaking into her stomach.

“Joel…Hey, eyes on me,” she says sharply, giving him a small shake. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

“S’done…” he slurs out, his words broken and stuttered. “G-Got all…s-sorted…won’t b-bother us anymore…”

“He’s not makin’ a whole lotta sense,” Edwin says worriedly. “You better get a heat into him, fast.”

He passes Joel over to her, Tess slipping herself beneath Joel’s arm. Even from this slight contact, Tess can feel moisture seeping into her sweater. He’s almost deadweight, but thankfully it’ll only take her about three steps to get him into a chair and let him collapse into it.

“Thanks, Edwin,” Tess says, and she means it. “I owe you one.”

“Don’t mention it,” Edwin says, and the look in his eyes is one of genuine camaraderie. “You and Joel got that stuff for Alyssa’s asthma – couldn’t just leave him out there after you did that for us.”

A door further down the hallway suddenly opens a crack and a bespectacled, irritated face peers out.

“What’s all the commotion? It’s damn near midnight!”

Tess manages not to roll her eyes. Norman is their neighbor across the hall, a sixty-something Boston native bellyacher who’s never seen without his Red Sox cap. He’s never short of a complaint, whether it’s people coming and going in the middle of the night after curfew (which she and Joel have been guilty of several times, conducting their trades after dark, in areas where the FEDRA guards are wet around the ears, bored and inattentive) or the Suttons’ new baby crying or blaming someone else’s overuse as the reason why he has no hot water or his electricity doesn’t happen to be working that day.

He also has an inexplicable animosity towards Texas and all people from it despite never having set foot in it. Tess thinks it’s more to do with the fact that he took an instant dislike to Joel and Tommy and decided from that day forward that all Texans were up to no good, that if he was going to be on unpleasant terms with them, he might as well go the whole hog and trash their home state while he was at it.

Usually, it manifests itself in childish digs about Texas only being the second-biggest state or the dismal 1988 Dallas Cowboys season or how Whataburger is a load of shit. It’s kind of pathetic, really. Most times Joel doesn’t even dignify him with a response, so Tess has no clue why the old fool keeps it up.

Guess everybody needs a hobby in the apocalypse. 

Neither she nor Joel pretended to be too relieved when Norman rallied through the flu outbreak two Decembers ago that almost had FEDRA sealing off their building to prevent it from spreading.

Norman sets eyes on Joel now, soaked to the skin and shivering, and his face twists into an annoyed grimace

“Jesus Christ, what’s that damned idiot done now? Doesn’t he know it’s brick out?”

“Joel had some last-minute business to attend to. Couldn’t wait for the weather,” Edwin says diplomatically. “I’m just makin' sure he gets home safe.”

Norman just lets out a cantankerous snort.

“I better get goin'. Marylin’s expecting me back,” Edwin says, turning back to Tess. He gives Joel a clap on the shoulder that makes him full-body wince. “Hang in there, big guy.”

“See you later, Edwin,” Tess calls after him as he heads back on his own way. She grits her teeth and hauls Joel through the doorway, into their apartment.

“Get your ass in here,” she mutters in an undertone. 

“Boy doesn’t really get the concept of “cold”, does he?” Norman calls after them, sounding almost smug now, like Joel’s terrible condition is amusing to him. “Maybe he shouldn’t be up here, shoulda stayed back in Texas if he don’t know to stay the hell at home when a nor’easter’s blowin’ in.”

“Fuck off, Norman,” Tess snaps before slamming the door.

He’ll be whining about that the next time he sees her, but she doesn’t care. She turns around, having only dared to leave Joel standing under his own power for a second, grabbing hold of him again before he faceplants on the floor.

“What the hell were you thinking, Joel?” she growls, escorting him none-too-gently to their kitchen table and plopping him into a chair. Now that her fears about him becoming a human popsicle have been allayed, all the anger that she’s been keeping at a simmer all evening feels about ready to boil up and over.

Joel doesn’t answer, just kind of hunches there in the chair, looking at the floor. His hearing isn’t great at the best of times – maybe the hypothermia is affecting it even more.

Tess takes him by the chin, makes him look her in the eye again. His eyes are dull and struggling to focus – that’s bad. Poor cognitive responses are usually a sign that the hypothermia has progressed to the moderate-to-severe stage. Melted snow is dripping off him so liberally a small puddle is collecting on the floor under the chair. He’s quite literally soaked to the bone. But, ironically enough, the shivering is a good sign. If he weren’t, then he’d be in real trouble, his body effectively shutting down and not even trying anymore, readying itself for death.

Well, that’s not gonna fucking happen. He’s made it this far. She’ll get him out the other side.

“Look at the state of you,” Tess says exasperatedly, ducking into the bathroom to retrieve the two towels they own. “I told you not to do this. I knew this was gonna happen. Or worse.”

“Had to – had t-to d-do it,” Joel mutters in that disjointed, shiver-riddled voice. “W-Wasn’t…another ch-choice…He – he w-would’ve…”

“Would’ve hurt me?” Tess says curtly, shaking out the towels, stiff from years of washing with harsh detergent. “Well, like I told you earlier, I’d rather have taken my chances, because even Jared would’ve had to take a look out the window and see that extreme circumstances prevented us.”

“C-Couldn’t…couldn’t t-take that risk,” Joel mumbles, and even with his words slurred and chattered, she can detect a sliver of his usual stubborn personality seeping through.

Tess doesn’t reply, just tightens her jaw. She’s mad and she wants him to know it but part of her already knows it’s a losing battle, recognizes that Joel’s not going to be made to apologize for doing this, not if he feels content that he’s done the right thing and can put his fears to bed. And if he was afraid that she was in danger, nothing would’ve stopped him, not snow, not a biblical flood, not hellfire raining down from the sky.

Tess thinks about how quickly word travels around the QZ and she’s not sure to believe if Joel’s stunt tonight will only increase the admiration/fear that other QZ residents have of him or will cause them to just write him off as even crazier than they first believed.

Maybe there’s some ridiculous souls out there that might think it romantic.

“W-Was q-quick. In and – in and out,” Joel stutters, as if he’s trying to fill the silence while she stews disapprovingly. “N-Nobody on the st-streets, no F-FEDRA, n-no Infected. T-Took all the sh-short cuts and g-got there first. Took them t-twenty minutes to t-turn up. Just J-Jared and one…one other guy…G-Gave him wh-what he w-wanted…W-We’re done.”

“Great,” Tess bites out. “Glad to hear it.”

“C-Cards’re in my – in my – pack,” Joel grates out torturously, as if those damn ration cards are the biggest issue. “J-Jared, he…he d-didn’t…put up m-much of a…a f-fight. S-Said I could…have ‘em…A d-deal’s a – deal…”

“Of course he did,” Tess mutters. “He didn’t want to be out in this weather any more than you did, Joel, he’d want to get it fucking over with before you all turned into blocks of ice.”

She maneuvers his arms stiffly through the straps of his backpack, tosses it into the corner of the room. She’ll deal with that shit later.

“You – you should c-count ‘em out,” Joel says. “M-Make sure he – he d-didn’t d-double cross you.”

His voice is starting to grow a bit weaker. Worry snags deeper into Tess’s stomach.

“Later,” she mutters. “Let’s take care of you first.”

“H-He w-won’t remember,” Joel slurs. “But I c-can…m-make sure he c-can’t f-find a way t-to...s-step on us…”  

Tess isn’t even sure what he’s talking about now. Is he still talking about Jared, or has he moved on to someone else? His words are starting to take on a slightly delirious edge, as if he’s in a fever dream.

“Joel, I don’t know what you mean,” she says sternly.

“I thought – I thought –”

God, he can’t even get the air into his lungs to speak properly, the shivers are wracking his body so fiercely.

“Okay, stop, just…just breathe for me, huh?” Tess says, trying not to sound too alarmed.

Joel does as she asks, going silent, almost curling in on himself, one fist gripping the collar of his jacket, in a white-knuckled way that’s reminiscent of how her grandfather had had a death grip his bedsheets when he was near the end of his battle with Alzheimer’s, clutching fistfuls of the patchwork quilt as he trembled and moaned, his agonal breathing eerily similar to Joel’s right now.

Tess watches him, tries not to get too lost in the memory, to think this through and not panic. How’s she gonna get him warmed back up?

A lukewarm shower is out. Most of the pipes in Boston are probably frozen by now and more than a few will have burst completely from the ice making them expand. Tess had already taken FEDRA’s advice and filled all their cups and bottles and saucepans with water before it stopped running. But she tries turning the tap anyway, just to check, and only a couple of droplets manage to come struggling out. Dammit.

But she shakes it off, decides she’s pretty sure sticking Joel in the shower would just send him into shock and kill him all the faster. A better start would probably be to get those sodden clothes off him and dry him off a bit.

“Arms up,” Tess orders, and Joel can’t even lift them above his head, only manages to raise them to shoulder-level, both quaking like tree branches in high wind. Shit.

She should get him into bed. If she leaves him in this chair for much longer, he’ll probably slump over into unconsciousness, and she’ll have to drag him instead.

Boots off first. There’s water sloshing in the bottom of them, it could take days to dry them out completely. His clothes are so plastered to his skin that Tess has to yank to get them off, it’s almost like they’re glued on. She’s almost out of breath just getting his jacket and flannel off. The only item she leaves on his body is his broken watch – she knows he wouldn’t want her to take it off, even now. Christ, even his underwear is waterlogged. She makes him stand up and he does, slowly and painfully, leans his weight on her while she gets him to step out of them.

It comes out of nowhere, unbidden, like it usually does, but the apartment whooshes away and suddenly Tess is standing in a bathroom, instructing Theo to step out of his pajama pants before putting him in the bath.

She shakes the memory away – later, okay? – and makes Joel sit back down again, naked and trembling. The sight of it makes her stomach lurch unpleasantly, gives her a feeling in her throat like she’s swallowed a stone. It’s not often she sees him bare and vulnerable like this. It makes her forget the ruthless, unstoppable man she mostly knows. Or, more accurately, it makes her remember that it’s just a façade, that he’s a human like all the rest of them, who’s been hurt and can get hurt again, all too fragile and one wrong move, one unlucky day away from being broken beyond repair.

Stop it, Tess. Maybe one day. But not tonight.

Tess bites her lip and gets to work, drapes one of the towels over Joel’s shoulders, scrubbing away every drop of moisture she can find still clinging to his skin, swiping their chill away one-by-one. She has to remind herself to be gentle, that jarring movements can trigger cardiac arrest in hypothermia victims.

“This is not good, Joel,” she mutters, because she’s anxious and talking to him helps her feel like she’s still in control of this whole thing. Even with most of the melted snow mopped away, his skin is still freezing, like the chill of the snow has gotten into his very bones. “You better hope this is as bad as it gets. Don’t think FEDRA’s medical center is up and running right now.”

“D-Don’t matter,” Joel says tiredly. “L-Least now he w-wont…hurt you…B-Better it b-be me than…you…”

He’s far too serene about this whole thing, about the possibility that his body could just shut down from stress and cold and exhaustion. And Tess knows that’s genuinely how he feels about this. All his fingers and toes could’ve dropped off from frostbite and he’d still have no regrets. It kind of makes her want to slap him.

Instead, Tess wordlessly wraps the towel around his feet, bundling them up tight and then dumps the other towel over his head and rubs it vigorously through his hair, trying to soak up as much of the dampness as she can. There’s snowflakes clotted in his hair, almost frozen to chunks of ice in some places.

It happens again. One minute she’s bent over Joel, drying his wet hair, and then the next she’s rubbing a towel over Theo’s head, drying his hair after bathtime. His giggles ring in her ears.

Tess pulls the towel away, almost recoiling, and it’s not her little boy’s face that looks up at her, but Joel, eyes hazy and red-rimmed, cheeks scoured raw from the wind, lips an unsettling hue of purple, hair standing up on end. It’s enough to break her out of it.

Enough. Too much remembering. Joel’s the one who needs you now.

“Come on,” she says, her tone soft despite still feeling anger thrumming in her stomach. “Into bed, you’ve had a long fucking night.”

She holds out her hands and he takes them, his grip weak, his touch cold as death. His fingers are a vivid red, working their way towards frostbite (why didn’t you wear gloves, you idiot) and his nails are a bluish-gray color. All the clinical signs are making Tess’s guts writhe like they’ve turned into a squirming pile of worms in the earth.

They walk into the bedroom (well, she walks, Joel kind of staggers clumsily) and Tess pulls back the quilt. Joel doesn’t so much climb in as collapse in, almost falling face forward, the springs protesting under his weight, his legs still hanging over the edge. Tess has to lift them up and on to the mattress, roll him over till he’s lying in the center of the bed, starting to huddle into a ball. She pulls the quilt over him, tucking it in tight around the edges of his body, so no pockets of cold air can get to him.

“W-What now?” Joel mumbles.

“Don’t move and get some heat into you,” Tess orders. “I’m gonna fix you something warm to drink.”

She goes over to the kitchen, picks up one of the saucepans she’d filled with water earlier and puts it on the hotplate. Thank God the electricity is still holding out. She paces back and forth between checking on Joel in the bedroom and checking on the water in the kitchen. She wants it warm, not boiling – she thinks anything too hot will further fuck up Joel’s internal homeostatic system and stop his heart. This needs to be slow and steady, not fast.

While she’s waiting, Tess decides to check out those godforsaken ration cards. In the face of Jared’s threats, they’d kind of lost their significance this past week. Joel’s backpack is as wet as the rest of him, and Tess isn’t surprised when she unzips it and finds that, even though Joel’s taken the trouble to stuff as many of them as he could into plastic Ziploc bags, a lot of them are completely sodden and gummed together in fat, wet wads. It’s going to take her ages to delicately peel the soggy paper apart without tearing them and drying them one by one, like how she used to dry her books with a hairdryer if she dropped them in the bath.

It takes all of Tess’s effort not to crush them angrily in her fist and throw them to the floor. They don’t feel like the prize she’d imagined them to be. Or at least, she’s not feeling triumphant like she usually would at a score this big.

She tries to find the root of her anger. It’s made up from more than just ire towards Joel for going out into the storm. It’s also the guilt she feels, spreading through her like rot. He would never have been out there tonight if it wasn’t for her, if she hadn’t agreed to do the deal with Jared, if she hadn’t taken so long to acquire the shotgun shells. He’s not supposed to do these things alone, not supposed to endure so much pain on her behalf. For an absurd moment, she wishes they’d gone together and were both hypothermic right now. They’re a team. If they’re gonna go down, they go down together.

What if things had gone badly, if tempers had flared at the rendezvous and she wasn’t there to bring it down a notch? What if Jared and his crew had decided to take Joel out of the equation tonight? What if he’d just never come home and she’d never know what became of him? What would she have done then? And it’s not to do with the fact that, without her bodyguard, other smugglers in the QZ might suddenly be emboldened to walk all over her, or worse.

It’s to do with the fact that she can’t lose him. Not after this long, not after all this time.

Tess shakes herself and peers into the saucepan again, waits until a sheen of tiny bubbles has formed on the bottom and steam is starting to waft up in lazy, barely perceptible swirls.

She pours it into a mug, takes it into the bedroom, makes Joel sit up and hands him the cup, quickly ends up having to brace her own hand underneath it because Joel’s fingers are too numb and shaking too hard for him to wrap them properly around the mug. They’re kind of locked in a pincer shape, like a crab, unable to make a fist.

“Slow sips,” Tess urges. “Atta boy.”

While Joel drinks, his teeth clattering noisily against the edge of the mug, his fast breathing causing the liquid to bubble and spurt, she glances at the alarm clock. It’s getting late. Exhaustion begins to creep over her, her body crashing after all the stress of the evening. She thinks she should take the couch, give Joel the space to recover, but she already knows she won’t be able to sleep. She can’t take her eyes off him, otherwise fear will start to play like a fiddle in her mind, perhaps reaching a frenzy and she can’t allow that to happen. She’s going to sit up and watch him for hours, until the worst of his symptoms go away and she can stop worrying that he’s going to slip into a coma and his organs will start to shut down.

He finishes the water and Tess tucks him back in again, tugging the blanket up to his neck, resigning herself to being awake all night. It’s not like she hasn’t done it before, watching Joel after a bad pill-booze combo to make sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit or his breathing got so depressed that it just stopped altogether. To his credit, when he came out the other side in the morning, he always had the decency to look at the dark rings under her eyes and seem a little ashamed.

He’s still not looking great – hair stringy and damp despite her thorough towel-drying, eyes glassy and half-lidded, his shivers so strong they look more like rigors, his breathing not slowing down. Tess puts her fingers against the side of his throat and feels his heart surging away, far too fast. Worry seeds itself deeper into her stomach. Surely there should be a bit of improvement by now. Unless he’s more far gone than she first suspected.

“Joel?” Tess threads her fingers through his hair, palming the side of his head, trying to get his attention. Her thumb brushes against his ear, throbbing scarlet and stinging cold. His gaze drifts up to her blearily.

“Answer me, how long have we lived in Boston?” she asks.

They do this sometimes, if a deal has gone very wrong, with fists exchanged rather than words, and he’s taken a blow to the head and she’s checking how bad the concussion is, asks questions to see if his memory is impaired, to get an indication of how scrambled his brain might be.

“T-Ten years,” Joel mumbles.

“Good. What month is your birthday in?”

“S-September…”

“And what’s the last thing we traded with Bill and Frank?”

“Uh…s-screws and b-bolts?” Joel guesses, not sounding sure at all.  

Okay, maybe that one’s a little harder. But this is a good sign. He’s still cognizant enough for her to believe that this is just a moderate case of hypothermia. As long as he stays wrapped under those blankets, his body should start to warm back up and return to normal. Slow but steady.

Then, suddenly, everything is plunged into inky darkness.

Tess startles, looks around, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness, wondering what the hell just happened. From down the hallway, she can hear a distant chorus of groans of dismay and annoyed shouts from their neighbors, and her heart sinks, realizing what’s happened. Somewhere out there, the wrong cable has snapped or the wrong fuse box has short-circuited and now the power’s out.

“Fuck!” she hisses, frustration burning hotly in her chest. Joel doesn’t respond or ask what’s going on. All she can hear is the juddering sound of his breathing.

Can’t they catch a fucking break? The power still running was one of the only positives she had and now it’s gone, no way of knowing when it’ll be back.

She sits there on the edge of the bed, frozen into motionlessness by her own sense of ineffectuality, for what feels like ages. She can feel the heat starting to steadily fade from the room. She starts to shiver a little herself. She reaches towards Joel, feels for the top of his head. His hair still feels damp, his scalp cold. She lowers her hand to where his mouth is, feels small, frantic puffs of breath against her palm. They feel hot, which is good. But he still can’t stop shivering – she can feel the vibrations traveling through the mattress, like the faint tremors of an earthquake.

What if, now that the power’s out, he just gets even colder and colder? What then?  

Tess puts her head in her hands, sighs very loud and long. She jumps when something cold touches her thigh and realizes that one of Joel’s bare feet has slipped out from under the blanket.

“Keep your feet under, dumbass,” she bites out, shoving it back under the blanket. She’s been wearing two pairs of socks to try and keep the feeling in her own feet. She peels one pair off, pushes back the blanket to expose Joel’s feet and slips them on to his instead. Maybe that’ll save a few of his toes. She didn’t see any of them turning white or blistered or swollen when she was drying them but suddenly she wishes the lights were back on so she could check them once more.

The thought of frostbitten toes suddenly makes Tess remember Maryland.

It was winter, the worst storm she’d ever seen up until now. They were still vagabonds back then, not entirely sure where they were going and what they were gonna do, just heading in the general direction of Boston and hoping for the best. But winter could stop them in their tracks for months and sometimes they’d just have to find a place and settle until the thaw, defend it with their lives from other survivors who were also looking for shelter.  

She thinks it had been January. They’d found an old farmhouse, found the former owner’s skeleton sitting in an armchair, a hole in the back of the skull, rifle still balanced between its legs, barrel clamped between the teeth. They’d been there for about two weeks when a terrible blizzard, not unlike this nor’easter, had blown in. They were out of food, hadn’t been able to scrounge up any tins or old army rations, and had no choice but to go out and look, because they were starving. The agreement among the group had been to return by sundown. Tess and Joel had teamed up and only managed to snare a single squirrel, not enough for a snack, let alone feed twelve people. But all the wildlife seemed to have hunkered down from the storm as well, the surrounding woods and fields seemingly bereft of life.

Tommy and another member of their group, Joshua, were late getting back from their hunt. The sun had dipped below the horizon, night giving the wind an even crueler bite, and Joel and another member of their group had gone out to find them. Unlike tonight, it had taken them only half an hour before they found Tommy and Joshua huddling together inside the hollow of an oak tree, having got lost and disoriented on the way back and deciding to wait out until dawn. They’d dragged them back to the farmhouse, three ice-encrusted rabbits swinging from Tommy’s belt and one more from Joshua’s backpack, which worked as a peace offering for the rest of the group, who were hungry and irritable about having to mount a rescue mission.

The pair of them were hypothermic as hell. Joshua had only a pair of trainers that were completely unsuitable for the weather and his toes had suffered as a result, swelling up and losing all circulation. Another member of the group, his cousin, had looked after him while Joel seemingly blocked the rest of the world out, on a single-minded, one-man mission to ensure that Tommy didn’t die. He wouldn’t even let Tess help.

He'd been so angry. Kind of like Tess has been tonight. Couldn’t believe Tommy’s stupidity, had only gotten madder when Tommy shakily explained they’d exposed themselves to the icy wind on an open plain in order to better hunt for rabbit warrens. She remembers Joel calling him every variation of “stupid fuckin’ idiot asshole” under the sun, plus a few things in Spanish that she didn’t understand but could tell were derogatory from Joel’s scathing tone.

The fireplace had collapsed in on itself at some point, bricks and debris blocking the flue, so they couldn’t make a fire without smoking out the entire room. Joel stripped all of Tommy’s clothes off him, put him in his sleeping bag and then undressed down to his underwear and slipped inside the sleeping bag with his brother, wrapping his arms around him and sharing his body heat, his irate mutterings gradually softening to comforting murmurs as Tommy’s shivers decreased.

Tommy and Joshua survived that night and they managed to survive that winter. They lost Joshua to an Infected later that summer, his jugular and windpipe ripped clean out by a Clicker. Only about six of them, herself, Joel and Tommy included, actually made it to Boston. They’d gradually fallen out of contact with the other three. They formed their new lives, becoming smugglers, making a name for themselves. Then Tommy left last year with the Fireflies and it was just her and Joel.

Tess reaches for Joel’s face again, touches his cheek. Still cold as death. 

What if the hours pass and he still feels cold and it’s because it’s for real?

Tess jumps to her feet. She rips her sweater up and over her head, her blouse underneath, unclips the one good bra she owns, tosses them all to the floor. She’s not really sure why she’s doing this – Joel’s unceasing shivering and the memory of that winter in Maryland, has jolted her into action. She steps out of her jeans, her underwear, but keeps the socks on – she doesn’t need her feet for this.

Joel doesn’t make any protest or question her when she lifts the blanket up and burrows underneath, pressing herself against him. She can’t help but gasp when her bare skin touches his (Christ, he’s cold as a corpse), but she pulls the blankets over both their heads, sealing them in a makeshift cocoon, and then she wraps herself around him, pulling him close, gritting her teeth against the discomfort and winding her arms around him, throwing her leg over his hip, snuggling in as tight against him as she can, even though the action makes goosebumps shimmy up her arms.

His whole body feels unnaturally cold. Like his heart is pumping ice water through his veins instead of blood. But he’s not making any vocal complaints about it. Just suffering stoically in silence, like he always fucking does. Or maybe he’s too weak to complain, but she doesn’t want to have to contemplate that.

It’s an odd role reversal. Joel is usually the warm one. He retains heat the way the pavement does on a blistering summer’s day. On winter nights like this, Tess craves his heat, wrapping her cold hands around his waist to knot around his belly, pressing her cheek to the hot skin of his back, feeling the knobs of his spine against her cheekbone.

She’s always had poor circulation in her hands and feet. Sometimes, on those nights, she’d hear Joel make a small intake of breath at the first touch of her clammy hand against his skin.

Right now, she wills her blood to flow into her fingertips as she runs her hands up and down Joel’s arms, his back. She wills her own body to be enough to save his.

The only heat she can feel emanating from his body is an island of warmth pooled around his torso – it’s his blood retreating inwards from his extremities to protect his internal organs. She knows this because Joel told her himself, years ago, during that winter in Maryland. Even on clear-skied days without blizzards, it was so cold she would wake in the morning with ice crystals having formed on her eyelashes overnight.

She remembers too, Joel sitting her up carefully because she couldn’t see and holding his thumbs to her eyelids to melt them, his touch gentle and careful. She remembers how, even when temporarily blinded, she trusted him completely even though she’d only known him less than a year.  

He took care of her, even though he didn’t have to. Tonight, that was all he was trying to do. Take care of her, protect her from Jared’s wrath, even if he was imagining the threat as worse than it was.

It can manifest itself in maddening, self-destructive ways, like tonight, but Tess thinks it’s one of the things that made her fall in love with him.

She puts two of her fingers against the side of Joel’s neck again, feels his pulse racing underneath her fingertips, the blood shuttling frantically through his body, his heart rate still far too tachy.

Worry continues to gather in the pit of her stomach, accumulating like a hairball does in the belly of a cat. It's slow and still at a manageable level for now but gathering nonetheless.

She cradles his head against her chest, hooking her chin over the top of his head. He moans something that might be a word or just a wordless noise of distress, the staccato of his frantic breaths, bracketed by shivers, hot against her sternum, tiny beads of moisture forming in the crease between her breasts from where his exhaled air meets her skin.

“C’mon baby, you’re okay,” she whispers. “Just breathe for me.”

He tries. He’s exhausted and feels on the verge of a complete physiological crash, but he's not so far gone that he can’t even understand what she’s saying anymore. She feels him swallow, trying to blow out his breath more slowly, trying to get it under control and he almost succeeds for a couple of inhales but then another shiver rocks his body and he’s back to panting in those short, sharp gasps. The sound of it makes a knot tighten in Tess’s throat and she finds herself clutching him tighter, rubs her hand in slow circles between his quaking shoulder blades.

This is her fault, she thinks with a cold, crystal certainty. It’s an immutable fact, like how being bitten by an Infected will turn you into a mindless monster. If she’d never agreed to that stupid deal back in December, none of this would be happening. The six month supply of ration cards had been pretty damn tempting back then, but now they just feel like worthless bits of paper compared to her partner, shivering violently in her arms, who’s marched through searing snow and lashing wind and brought himself to the brink of death for her sake, all because he was afraid for her.

He can’t die, he can’t die, he can’t die…

Tess clenches her jaw and swallows hard, tries to get a grip. She tries to tell herself she’d had no way of knowing that this would be the outcome, that the whole thing would drag on for so long, that so much bad blood would form from as a result, that she’d had no way of knowing they’d end up here, with her clinging to Joel like she was trying to keep him tethered to this world, to her.

She’d had no way of knowing she’d be terrified of feeling his heartbeat come to a stop against hers.

She wonders, with a pang in her chest, if Joel blames her for all of this. He’s not really the resenting type, but Tess almost wishes he would get angry, lash out at her like he had at Tommy when he’d been hypothermic all those years ago.

But deep down, she knows he won’t. If he feels anything, it’s probably just relief that Jared got his ammo and won’t be bothering them again and anything else isn’t worth wasting thought on.

Still. Tess presses her cheek to the top of his head. Her own body is starting to shiver a little from the prolonged exposure to his icy skin, but she takes it in wordlessly. She takes all the cold that’s engulfed his body, imagines that she’s trying to melt it from him, like an icicle liquefying when the sun’s fire reaches it come dawn.

Tess thinks it’s been half an hour since the power went out – she’s got no way of telling time now, the alarm clock will be useless until the electricity returns. She counts Joel’s breaths and they’re still unsettlingly quick, coming every second it feels like. They just lay there in the darkness, the air growing stuffy underneath the blanket from their breathing, which would normally bother her but now she sees as a good thing. Warm, stuffy air will only be of help to Joel now.

She teases his hair between her fingers, trying to work out the last of the moisture from it. She imagines it all fluffy, the curls becoming more prominent the way they do when he needs a trim.

“Tess?” Joel suddenly whispers in the dark.

“Yeah, dummy,” she whispers back. “What other woman’s gonna take her clothes off and get into bed with you?”

“What’s goin’ on?” He sounds hazy, almost like he does when he’s drugged up.

“You’re too cold. I’m warming you up,” Tess explains softly.

“I c-can’t…I d-don’t…”

“Try not to talk,” she hushes.

“I c-can’t f-feel my legs…” he croaks.

“They’re still there, don’t worry. You’re just too numb right now to feel anything properly.”

He curls closer to her, almost convulsing, lets out a small sound, almost like a whimper. Tess’s heart clenches with something that feels like love, and then all the terrible fear that comes hand-in-hand with it.

“It’s okay. You’re okay,” she whispers, resuming rubbing circles against his spine.

“D-Does Tommy know?”

“Does Tommy know what?” Tess asks, dread suddenly pulling at her stomach like a magnet at the mention of his brother’s name.

“Th-That I – t-that we g-got it d-done? This sh-shit with J-Jared?” Joel stammers out painfully. “H-He m-mighta…I sh-shoulda asked f-for his…his help…”

Fuck. A chill runs through Tess that has nothing to do with being huddled up next to Joel’s frozen body. Is he losing track of time, completely forgotten that Tommy’s not part of their smuggling ring anymore, hasn’t been for over a year. Please don’t say he’s forgotten all about that and she’s going to have to break it to him, like how she used to have to break her grandfather’s heart over and over by reminding him that her grandmother was dead every time the Alzheimer’s made him forget.

Or maybe it’s something different from that. Maybe it’s an animal part of his brain, feeling cold and afraid and in mortal peril, that wants the comfort of knowing his brother is near?

Either way, Tess feels afraid she’s about to shatter something inside of him.

“Joel, Tommy doesn’t know anything about our deal with Jared,” she explains slowly. “He’s not in Boston. He left last year. Headed out west, with the Fireflies. Marlene sent him and a bunch of others on some cockamamie mission to Colorado. You don’t remember that?”

She waits with bated breath for his reaction, but Joel just mumbles, “Oh…Right…”, and Tess can’t help but feel a little relief unspool inside her at this dispassionate reaction that sounds more like the Joel she knows

It hadn’t exactly been a cordial farewell. Tommy had hugged Tess before he left but his and Joel’s last words had devolved into a shouting match, about how Tommy was stupid and this Firefly shit would get him killed and how Joel wasn’t even recognizable as his brother anymore and how Tommy couldn’t keep doing this, before he’d slammed the door on his way out.

That night, Joel had gotten wasted on their last good bottle of Macallan (he didn’t share) and then spent the better part of a fortnight throwing himself into work (both the mandated and illegal kinds) to try and poorly disguise the fact that he was freaking out now that Tommy was no longer under his watchful eye. Tommy hadn’t exactly helped matters by only deigning to get back in touch and provide an update about two months later (couldn’t find an operational radio tower, her ass). But it seemed their harsh parting words were forgotten and now they keep in regular contact, with Tommy using a radio tower out in Denver to pass messages along to Joel via Abe, the guy in charge of the comms here.

He hides it well, but Tess can tell that Joel misses him. He claims to be used to worrying about Tommy from a distance, where he’s too far away to do anything about it, from back when he served in Desert Storm, but Tess is sometimes afraid that the fear and the not-knowing will take hold of Joel someday, like it did tonight, and he’ll do something insane like try to walk across the fucking country to Colorado. Luckily, Tommy is probably afraid of the same thing, which is why he checks in on a regular basis. It’s enough, for now anyway, to keep Joel back from his worst impulses.

She thinks maybe she should tell him more often that she misses Tommy too.

“G-Goin’ out there…” Joel stammers again. “He’s…f-fuckin’ s-stupid.”

“He can be,” Tess agrees quietly. “But he can be sweet too.”

She doesn’t worry about if Tommy will get killed, he’s far sharper than Joel gives him credit for. But she doesn’t think his sweetness is a good match for the Fireflies either. Sure, they’d roped him in with promises about how he could still do good for this world, how they would return it to the way it was, but that was rarely the reality that Tess saw.

Sometimes she still has dreams about that time she saw them firebombing the FEDRA truck that was transporting gasoline back to headquarters. The bodies bursting out from the back of it, wreathed in flame, the skin melting off their bones, flailing wildly and, God, the screaming.

You’d think she’d get used to sound of humans in torment after this long, but she still hears the screams.

Same as being around Joel wore on Tommy’s soul, Tess has the sinking feeling that being around the Fireflies will eventually do the same.

“D-Did I tell you…?” Joel says haltingly. “T-Tommy, he s-says they’re gettin’ – gettin’ m-moved up to…L-Laramie…”

He did. Last month. Seems like Joel’s faculties still aren’t quite a hundred percent yet.

“Yeah, you told me that,” Tess murmurs.

“I t-told him n-not to…”

“Go to Laramie?”

“G-Go w-with the F-Fireflies…”

“You can’t make Tommy do anything he doesn’t want to,” Tess mutters. “He’s like you. Both stubborn asses. Runs in the family.”

“Y-You know w-what I think?” Joel says in a quivering voice. “I don’t – I don’t think it was f-for the F-Fireflies…I think – I think I d-did it…”

Dismay pools in Tess’s stomach. She knows where this is going, what he’s about to say. Sometimes he goes off on a similar tangent when he’s coming down from the drink or the hydro. It’s like being in that state makes him more willing to dig underneath his own skin, to pull something up from the root that’s been growing for a while, bothering him, something he’d keep quiet about if alcohol or pills hadn’t loosened his words and made the neurons fire more sloppily in his brain.

And she always has to be the one to soothe that ache inside him, plug the wounds he opens up.

“I s-shouldn’t’ve…the th-things I…” Joel chokes out between shivers. “He h-hated m-me for it…”

“Shh. No more talking,” Tess whispers sternly.

“He was r-right…I’m not…I’m not…”

“Joel.” Tess cups his wind-chapped cheek in her hand before he can get much further, stops him before he can backslide into that dark place where he claws over the past, rips holes in himself to try and make sense of it all. She can just make out of the gleam of his eyes in the dark. “You kept him alive. That’s all that matters. Alright? All of us…we did what we had do to survive. And that’s all there is to it.”

It’s not quite close to the truth. There are some places here and there where she thinks that maybe he didn’t have to kill this person or torture that person and she didn’t have to stand back and let it happen or give him the nudge. But it’s the closest approximation to the truth that she has to give him.

He doesn’t answer. She’s not sure if it’s enough, so she just clasps him tightly to her as he shakes and shudders in her arms. He’s not crying but the choppy, uncontrollable breaths coming out of him sound so close to sobbing that Tess can’t tell the difference.

“M’cold,” he moans. “I can’t…I can’t breathe…”  

“I got you,” she murmurs.  

“Am I – am I d-dying?”

“No,” Tess says with a little more sharpness than she intends. “Of course not. I’m not gonna let you. I’ll kick your ass if you do.”

“Y-You’ll tell T-Tommy, right? If I – if I d-die…it ain’t his f-fault…”

It irritates Tess a little to hear him say that, to be so concerned with Tommy thinking any of this might be his fault, when she’s right here and feeling far more to blame than his oblivious brother who’s more than halfway across the country and had nothing to do with any of this. But what sends a cold shard of fear into her stomach is hearing Joel so…afraid.

He’s never acted like this before. She knows he’s not afraid of death, whenever it decides to come for him. Just like everyone else in the apocalypse, he’s not shy about discussing the topic – he’s expressed relief during close calls and muttered about how some risky endeavor is “gonna get them killed” and promised Tess that if she ever gets bit, he won’t let her turn. But now he’s asking her if he’s going to die, in that quivering, unsettlingly childlike voice, like he’s scared she’ll say, “Yes, you are.”

“You’re not gonna die,” Tess hisses. “Stop talking like that.”

But maybe he’s got a point to be concerned. He’s still shivering so hard she's worried he might throw up, still hyperventilating, still raw and foggy and helpless in a way he almost never is, and it feels like they’re not making any progress. The bundle of worry sitting in her stomach catches like tinder and the thought of Joel being dead by morning suddenly makes Tess’s heart start to beat almost as fast as his is right now. One day, but not tonight, she’d told herself earlier. But now her mind whispers:

Is it tonight?

She’d first met him as a thirty-eight-year-old, two years after Outbreak Day. She remembers those early days, their nomadic lives out on the unforgiving road, traveling north, Joel outwardly stone-faced but always with that visceral grief just under the surface. She’d recognized it in him immediately as she did in herself, as if it had a physical giveaway. The memories of Alex dead in a pool of his own blood on their kitchen floor and her sweet little Theo banging and shrieking at the basement door would bring it alive inside her, so sharp and howling and vengeful that it took her years to tame it even a little.

For Joel, it was also a beating, clawing, restless thing, but his not only left bloody marks on his soul but also on the bodies he left behind. He fought every damn day, with anything and anyone and with everything he had, for Tommy and for her. He took so many beatings it was honestly a miracle his body continued to function. And every time it was as if he was screaming up at the sky, daring whatever forces were out there to take him if they wanted, almost like he was hoping they would, only to be disappointed every time.

He hadn’t slowed down at all upon entering the QZ, upon entering his forties. He turns fifty this year. And she knows that he can’t keep going like this forever. They can’t keep going like this. Someday soon, age will tip the scales out of their favor. Someday they’re gonna push their bodies that bit too far or be too slow or too stupid or more breakable in the face of a vindictive smuggling rival or an Infected or a trigger-happy FEDRA officer. And they won’t know when that day will be.

Every human still alive knows they’re living on the edge, that nothing is guaranteed. It was something everyone knew even before the world fell apart and made the few guarantees they did have a thing of the past. It’s what Tess tells herself every morning, reminding herself to be smart, to make sure, to think it over ten times, to take every precaution. It’s what’s kept her and Joel alive this long.

But in this moment, with Joel clutched in her arms, she still feels an icy rush sweep over her, an icy rush that has nothing to do with the chill of her partner’s body, an icy rush that again asks the question:

Is that day today?

She kisses him because she doesn’t know what else to say to him right now, how else to drown out that voice in her head. She tips his chin up and presses her lips to his, burning cold and cracked against hers instead of warm, sucks his lower lip between hers, feels his violent, feverish breaths shuddering into her mouth. It’s not meant to lead to anything else – sex right now would probably just stress his body to the limit and lead to him having a heart attack rather than heating him up – but she feels almost desperate, willing to try just about anything to get him to stay alive.

She wants to remind him that she’s here, that she’s gonna take care of him, that he’s got someone to hold on to, that he’s gonna make it one more time, for her. She wants him to know, without having to put it into words, that she’s angry with him and stupidly grateful too and scared of being alone in this world and she refuses to contemplate a world without Joel Miller in it.

You’re still alive. You’re still here. You can’t die if your heart is right here, next to mine.

Another brutal shiver passes through Joel’s body, has him jerking against her, his muscles clenching and unclenching in torturous spasms, has him breaking away from Tess’s lips as his breath is expelled forcefully from his lungs in a rasp.

“It hurts,” he whimpers.

Oh, she bets. She can feel stark goosebumps prickled up all over his skin, knows he must feel like every inch of him is burning and stabbing from the pins and needles, from the blood that’s not circulating properly in his limbs, his joints stiff like they’ve fused solid, his veins constricting tight as vines, his muscles throbbing from the tremors that won’t loosen their grip and his lungs and ribs must be on fire by now from his fast, shallow breathing. There can’t be single part of him that doesn’t hurt.

“I know,” she soothes. “You’re gonna be fine. You’ll see.”

They lay there, in the quiet dark. Tess listens to the pitter-patter of the snow against the window, the storm roaring somewhere above their heads, while she traces small circles against Joel’s head, curling a lock of his hair around her fingertip.

“You’ll r-remember, right?” Joel mumbles. “The c-cards…C-Count ‘em out…”

He’s woozy, falling asleep. She decides she might as well let him. He’s had a long night.

“Yeah. Tomorrow. Go to sleep, querido,” Tess murmurs, using the word he whispers in her ear on those nights when they’re tangled together, his warmth buried deep inside her. “I’ll be right here.”

“W-what if I…what if I d-don’t…wake up…?”

“Then I’ll grab you by the balls and twist them till you do,” Tess says, but there’s nothing playful in her tone. The fear hasn’t gone away, and she reckons it won’t until she feels Joel’s body warm against hers again, in the way that she’s used to.

She hopes morning brings some relief. That he gets better and the storm moves through and they and the entire Boston QZ can shake themselves off and start clearing up the mess, get back to what passes for normal.

Joel’s eyes gradually flutter shut and he goes quiet, though his breaths still come in shudders and his muscles keep contracting like an electric current is passing through them. He sleeps and she feels weirdly alone. Just her and the shrieking wind at the window and her partner’s heart beating too hard against her body.

Tess settles in for a long night of keeping watch, blinks against her own exhaustion and wills herself to stay awake. She maneuvers Joel’s head until his ear is pressed against her left breast, against her heart. It’s his good ear, so she hopes he can hear it, the thump of her heartbeat, vibrant and loud, all her fear and love surging through her at top volume.

“You hear that, Texas? Just keep listening to that.”

It’s a silly thing. “Romantic” of her, she thinks disparagingly. The power of love isn’t a cure-all for hypothermia – they’re not in a movie, where this skin-to-skin would instantly work, in a magical Hollywood way. She’s done everything she realistically can do, that she knows to do, and the only thing she has left is wait and see. Joel listening to her heartbeat and her reassuring him isn’t going to be the thing that makes the difference.

But she thinks maybe it does something to him, floats through his dreams and sparks that stubbornness inherent in him, because Joel moves of his own volition, curling ever so slightly closer, clinging to her like a koala, nuzzling his cheek against her chest, his fingertips brushing gently against her stomach as the cold loosens its grip on his hands.

Hanging on in there, it seems to say.  

Tess presses her lips to the cool skin of his forehead.

I love you, you idiot. So, don’t fucking go.

/////

Tess doesn’t fall asleep until dawn, the pitch-black sky outside the windows turning to a feeble, mottled gray, the storm clouds still dense enough to obstruct the sun. Even if she hadn’t been too tense from focusing on Joel’s body in her arms, the precarious rattling of the windows probably would’ve been enough to keep her on edge and sleep at bay.

She decides it doesn’t matter – they’re not going anywhere today. The wind still sounds pretty wild, though it’s come down a couple of notches from last night. Snowflakes are still plunging down past the window. The entire QZ is probably either snowed-in or flooded from a storm surge. It’s gonna be a shitshow for the next few days, everyone struggling to get from place to place, FEDRA trying to get the usual services up and running, chiefly the power. They’ll probably be putting out calls for residents to shovel the roads, clear away the debris, burn any dead bodies left in the nor’easter’s wake. It’s a safe bet that Joel wasn’t the only hypothermic resident last night. He's probably been luckier than most. 

She’s spent the night waiting for the cold to melt away from Joel’s body, to feel the blood beginning to flow back through his body after picturing it as congealed sludge in his veins. The hours pass and she waits for the shivers to stop wracking Joel’s body, for the tension to drain from his muscles, for him to go slack against her and his breathing to finally settle.

It happens in increments as they lie there for hours in the warm darkness of their bed. The awful shivers that have tortured him since he got home finally begin to slow, coming to a pause, then starting back up again, then stopping for longer and longer periods each time, until at last they disappear altogether. And when they’re gone, his breathing starts to grow more regular, softer and deeper. Tess listens to the cadence of it for hours and hours, roots herself in the sensation of his ribcage expanding and contracting against her. Running her fingers up and down his back, she feels his skin getting less and less clammy, the chill leaching away. She holds his hand, threading her fingers through his and finds them warm to the touch. When morning begins to chase the night away and the room fills with enough dull light to enable her to see, she lifts the blanket and inspects his face. His lips have turned back to a healthy pink and his teeth are no longer chattering. His cheeks are still red from wind-burn – that’ll probably take a couple of days to fade away. She pinches his fingertip and watches the nail go white then flush back to pink. Good – his circulation’s back to normal.

That’s the point when she feels a dizzying wave of relief sweep her away into sleep, a light doze where she barely dreams. She jerks awake a little while later, the sun slightly higher in the sky. It must be mid-morning – she can’t tell the exact hour, the power’s still out, the alarm clock blank.

Tess groans, clenching her eyes shut as the beginnings of a headache start to thud in her temples. Her eyes feel scratchy from lack of sleep. Fuck, what a night.  

Joel is still laying on top of her, her arms still wound around his body. His breaths are slow, deep and even, a little bit of a snore rattling in his nose. He’s fast asleep. The kind of blackout sleep he can usually only achieve after chasing down oxy with a few shots of moonshine or corn liquor, or, more rarely, after coming down from a post-coital haze.

When the high of the relief starts to wear off, the sight of it starts to set Tess’s teeth on edge.

He’s fine. Fine. After all that, morning has broken and he’s sleeping soundly, returned to a normal human temperature, seemingly no worse for wear after almost getting frozen to death. Like it never happened. Like he didn’t do the stupidest fucking thing she’s ever seen him do. And she’s seen him sack a Clicker that was making a beeline for her, with nothing but a shard of wood from a broken doorframe to kill it with.

Well, she can’t tiptoe around it forever. Time for him to wake up and for them to have this out, whether it’s just her delivering him a terse reality check or a knockdown drag-out fight where she throws something at his head.

“Joel.” Tess utters his name, her voice hoarse from her shitty sleep.

He’s lying bad-ear side up, so doesn’t hear her and continues to slumber.

“Joel,” she says again, more sharply. “Wake up.”

That gets through. His eyes crack open, dark brown slivers, and she feels his form tense up, the fight-or-flight response that’s always there upon rousing, looking around to see what it was that woke him, searching for the danger – a behavior (or more likely a trauma response) he hasn’t trained himself out of after all these years in Boston. He registers the familiar environment of their apartment and her face, and she feels the rigidity bleed from his muscles again, his body melting against hers. Safe.

“S’it mornin’?” he slurs.

“Just about,” Tess mutters.  

“What time?”

“Don’t know, the power went out.”

“Shit,” Joel groans. “When did that happen?” She notices that he’s stopped stammering, his words coming clear again.

“About midnight.” Tess works her jaw, wondering when he’s going to cut to the chase, talk about last night.

“FEDRA been round yet?” Joel asks, lifting his head and looking around the room.

“No. Reckon they’re still busy trying to dig their vehicles out of the snow,” Tess says with a shrug.

“Mm. Good.” Joel wriggles around on top of her and groans loudly.

“Sore?” Tess asks grimly.

“Yeah…” Joel mutters, grimacing, moving his neck from side to side. Tess hears the bones click. She waits for him to bring it up, gets fed up when he doesn’t, too busy stretching his back and all his limbs one by one, and bites the bullet.

“You remember anything about last night?”

Joel stops short. She can’t tell if he’s genuinely struggling to remember or if he’s just embarrassed at his own dumbass behavior.

“Um…Got down to the docks. Traded the ammo with Jared. Was headin’ back this way…Got pretty cold and wet.”

“And after that?” Tess says, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Well, I made it home, obviously,” Joel says, sounding evasive, annoyed that she’s pressing this point. Maybe he remembers more than he’s saying and is just too proud to admit he fucked up last night.  

“Yeah,” Tess says, irritation starting to bleed in her voice. “Only after Edwin Abbott found you collapsed against a lamppost barely able to take another step and dragged you back here before you keeled over in the snow.”

She watches the words hit him, watches him combing through his memories and the expression of unease that flickers across his face when he realizes he has no memory of those particular details.

“Oh…” is all he’s able to say.

“Yeah. “Oh”,” Tess growls, starting to wriggle out from underneath him and pushing him off her. She sits up and sees Joel do a double-take when he sees her bare chest. She sees him glance down at himself, his own similar state of undress.

“Did we…uh…?”

“No, we didn’t,” Tess says tartly. “Funnily enough, seeing a man almost frozen to death isn’t my biggest turn-on.”

“Well, why –?”

“Skin-to-skin,” Tess explains briskly. “Under the covers, fastest way I could think of to warm you up while the hot water’s off.”

She stares him out, waiting for his response, but Joel fixes his gaze on the blanket, can’t bring himself to look her in the eye. She’s familiar with this tic from when he’s woken up after a bender, when the high wears off and his hangover makes itself known with a vengeance, and the embarrassment and self-loathing crash over him, his avoidant personality back in full-force after whatever heart-gushing confessions he’s spilled out through the night.

“Right…”

Tess shakes her head, her jaw clenched. She wasn’t really expecting him to have a lot to say, Joel’s always been a man of few words, but she’d hoped for more than that. He has the good grace to at least look a little chastened.

“How bad was I?” Joel asks quietly.

“Pretty fucking bad,” Tess says bluntly. “You couldn’t stand up, you were shaking like nothing I’ve ever seen, and you were asking for Tommy like you thought he was still here, in Boston.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Joel looking at his hands, flexing his fingers, testing them for any lasting damage.

“S’fine,” he mutters after about a minute. “I’ve had worse.”

And, goddammit, if that isn’t the last fucking thing she wants to hear him say. Maybe he has had worse, maybe he was the one who had to endure those awful shivers and all the mental confusion, but she’s the one who had to watch him like that, who waited up alone all night to feel if his heart was going to stop against hers, to see if she was going to feel his last breath shudder out of him, waiting in agony to see if she was going to feel the life slip away from him and find herself alone in this world. Her anger, stoked by a sleepless night and his dismissive attitude, comes fully to life.

“Joel, you were fuckin’ hypothermic,” Tess snaps. “You’re so goddamn lucky Edwin happened to be walking by, otherwise you might’ve collapsed and froze to death.”

Joel looks away from her, his expression unhappy, working his jaw. “How far away was I?”

“A block, he said.”

“He didn’t need to do that,” Joel says, almost mutinously. “I coulda made it.”

“For fuck’s sake, Joel,” Tess hisses. She really wishes Tommy was here, so she could have some back-up in the “Joel’s an idiot with no self-preservation” argument.

“Look, goin’ out there’s always a risk. Okay?” Joel bites back and Tess laughs humorlessly. She’d be a bit more heartened to see the fight back in him if he wasn’t trying to be in the right about almost dying.

“It is,” he insists, sounding annoyed now. “Infected, gettin’ shot at by FEDRA, fuckin’ Fireflies, rain, snow…But we’ve never let that shit stop us before, not when somethin’ bigger’s at stake.”

“Don’t pretend what you did last night was the same as that,” Tess seethes. “You went out there in weather like that, without backup, on a journey that takes us two hours on a good day. Jesus Christ, you know how dangerous blizzards are. Don’t you remember, Maryland? How you reamed out Tommy and Joshua for staying out in one to hunt for rabbits? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so pissed off. And now you’re just gonna sit there and act like what you did was no big deal?”

“Look, I’m not sayin’ it wasn’t,” Joel says with a sigh. “But…the guy’s crazy, Tess. You know he is. He was already wound up bad from our last meetin’ and I…I just thought that…He wasn’t gonna listen to any more excuses, not even the storm. And if I could do somethin’ to stop him from takin’ it out on you, then I’m gonna do it.”

Tess shakes her head, biting her lip in anger. He’s not gonna win her over with that shit. He can bear his heart if he wants to, it’s not going to paint his decisions last night in a less foolish light to her.

“And what actually did happen when you got there?” she asks. All she’s got to go on are the half-formed, jumbled sentences Joel was able to stammer out last night.

“It was quick. I made it there okay – it was only gettin’ back that the cold kinda hit me.”

“And what about Jared? What did he have to say when you showed up?” Tess asks, even though she doesn’t really want to know. She’d be happy to just forget Jared even exists after today.

“He was kinda impressed,” Joel says with a scoff. “Laughed at me – think he was just in a good mood from gettin’ the last of the ammo.”

Of course he laughed at you, Tess thinks irritably. It’s Jared’s turf – even if he had to go out in the blizzard, he didn’t have to travel as far a distance as Joel. He’s exactly the kind of sadistic asshole who’d find Joel potentially killing himself just to close a deal funny. And if it wasn’t that, then he was probably delighted that his threats had clearly gotten under Joel’s skin and scared him badly enough to make him go running around in a blizzard, at Jared’s beck and call. Looks like that motherfucker’s menacing reputation is going to get another boost once word gets out about last night.

“Well, I’m glad he got a good chuckle out of it,” she says bitterly.

“Last one he’s gettin’ of account of us,” Joel says with a huff. “Tess, we can’t trade with him ever again.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t be,” Tess agrees, noticing him trying to get off topic. She’s not about to let him.

“So, is that all you have to say for yourself?”

“What do you mean?” Joel says and it’s the almost sulky tone in his voice that blows a fuse in her brain.

“Don’t play dumb with me,” Tess snaps. “You don’t have anything to say about just leaving me like that? Marching off into a fucking snowstorm like the rules of nature don’t apply to you?”

Joel lets out a heavy sigh. “Well, what do you want me to say, Tess? I know it wasn’t my brightest move –”

Tess barks out a laugh and Joel frowns at her.

“– but I’d do it all over again, if I had to. There wasn’t any other choice.”

“Yes, there was,” Tess says through gritted teeth. “You could’ve just listened to me, so why didn’t you? What was it, Joel? Are you just getting stupider, or are you going senile in your old age?”

“Hey –” His brows draw down into a scowl, and she knows it was a low blow, but she cuts him off before he can say anything in his defense.

“We had a get-out-of-jail-free card, asshole. The whole QZ’s gonna be locked down for days, every single smuggling chain is gonna get held up, not just us. It can’t be helped. For fuck’s sake, I bet even Jared won’t be able to get that ammo to his customers for a few days. We would’ve had time to think this through and do it the smart way, but you just…charged right in there and left me in the lurch.”

She’s so mad she can’t even look at him. Joel doesn’t answer for a couple of moments, but out of the corner of her eye, she can see his fingers flexing, like it does when he’s struggling to come up with something to say.

“Listen, if it had been anyone else other than that motherfucker, I woulda listened to you,” he gets out at last. “But he just…he gives me a bad fuckin’ feeling, alright?” He shrugs his shoulders exasperatedly. “And…And the way I see it, a deal where everythin’s handed off without anyone comin’ to harm is a decent result. It’s done, we don’t gotta worry about him anymore.”

Tess clenches her eyes shut. Bullshit, everything he’s saying is such pathetic bullshit…

When she doesn’t answer him, doesn’t give him the exoneration he’s clearly looking for, he exclaims, “Tess, it ain’t like I showed up on the doorstep covered in blood.”

“I don’t care!” Tess bursts out, looking up at him again in fury. “I know you don’t care about what happens to you, but I do. And so does Tommy. Do you really want me to have to be the one to tell him over the radio that you’re dead?”

She watches the color blanch again from Joel’s face in a way that has nothing to do with being hypothermic.

“I didn’t – I didn’t ask you to do this,” Tess mutters. “I didn’t need you to do that for me. Not last night.”

“Jared –”

“Is just another fucking asshole, like all the others we’ve run into,” she grits out. “We had what he wanted, that would’ve been enough to make up for being a few hours overdue. We would’ve dealt with him. Together. Like we always do. But you wouldn’t even let me. You’ve always trusted me before, but you couldn’t trust me to know what to do about this. I wasn’t worried about Jared last night, but I was so fucking worried about you.”

“Tess –”

“Stop, don’t…Don’t do that, Joel. Don’t sit there and pretend like you can power through everything just because you say so.” She’s building up steam, feels everything tumbling out of her, doesn’t know how to stop it. “Don’t think that you can survive anything just because you’ve made it this far past Outbreak Day. You’re not an idiot, so don’t act like one. And face it – you’re middle-aged. You’re not always gonna be able to lurk about Boston like you’re the most dangerous thing in it. Any one of these shithead up-and-comers hears about how Jared messed with your head, and they could decide to try the same thing. You can’t – You can’t give people an opening, you can’t just do something reckless every time some asshole decides to threaten me.”

“Tess…” Joel says weakly. “Look, I won’t do somethin’ like this again. And you’re right, maybe I wasn’t thinkin’ straight. But it’s not like I was tryin’ to prove a point. I just had to.”

“You could’ve died last night. I could’ve been holding you as you died, you know. Or you could’ve just disappeared and I’d have never known what happened to you. Or…or FEDRA would call me up to burn bodies and yours might’ve been on the pile –”

Tess stops and swallows against a tight knot forming in her throat. No. She’s not gonna cry. She hasn’t cried for years, she hasn’t needed to and she’s not gonna cry over a silly thing like Joel being stupid or him not caring or not being remorseful.

Get a hold of yourself!

“Hey…” Joel’s voice has gone all soft. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” Tess says wearily.

“I am,” Joel says, and she shoots him a skeptical look.

“Okay, not for gettin’ that business with Jared done,” he clarifies begrudgingly. “You can be as mad at me as you want about that, but you ain’t gonna change my mind. And, anyway, it’s done. But…I’m sorry for scarin’ you.”

Tess lowers her head, stares into her lap. “You wouldn’t even have been out there if it wasn’t for me,” she whispers.  

“Don’t do that,” Joel mutters. “This ain’t your fault. Don’t…Don’t do that to yourself, Tess.”

“I knew about Jared’s reputation. You’re right, he’s bad news. All of Boston knows it,” Tess sniffs. “I should’ve turned him down the first time, back in December. Just told him no. Ration cards aren’t worth…all this shit…”

“Hey…C’mere.”

One of his hands – his warm, warm hands, those hands that always feel like they could melt through to her core when he touches her – circles around her wrist, pulling at her gently. Tess goes, relenting, letting him tug her back down to the mattress to lay on top of him.

As she lays against him again, feeling his strong heart against her ribs, she feels the anger start to burn itself out. She could hang on to it but what’s the point in it now? Joel's right. It’s over now. Stewing on past events isn’t how they do things. She wants them to get back to normality, to be on equal ground again.

Partners.

Joel captures one of her cheeks in the palm of his hand, a thumb softly tracing her cheekbone. She stares down into those eyes, big and dark brown, with a tender look in them she rarely sees, one that she knows is reserved only for her.  

“Thank you…” he murmurs. “For takin’ care of me.”

Tess huffs out a small sigh, feels a tiny smile curve at the corner of her mouth, can’t resist it. “C’mon, Texas, you know it’s gonna take a lot more than you pissing me off to turn you away in your hour of need.”

He chuckles, but then fixes her with a serious look. A promise.

“Never again, yeah?”

“Not unless you wanna make permanent friends with the couch,” Tess says, a little mischievousness seeping into her tone.   

He bites his bottom lip, a subtle tell that only Tess knows the meaning of.

She rolls her eyes fondly and obliges, presses her lips against his. They’re warm again, a brand of fire against her own, like she remembers. He kisses her long and deep, one hand palming the back of her head, fingers sliding through her hair, the other drifting downwards along her spine, cupping the small of her back, pulling her hips closer to his. There’s a moment where Tess almost leans into it – well, looks like they’ve made it through once again, what’s the harm in making the most of it – but the last vestiges of her annoyance with him pour cold water over any flickers of desire that might be beginning to kindle inside her.

Cool your jets, Tess.

She breaks the kiss, leans up on her elbows, pretends not to see the look of disappointment in Joel’s eyes.

“Uh-uh. You’re still in the doghouse.”

“You said yourself, FEDRA’s not gonna be knockin’ on the door anytime soon,” Joel says, curling a lock of her hair teasingly between his fingers.

“Well, as you were so keen to remind me last night, I got cards to count,” Tess says fondly, planting one more kiss at his temple and rolling off him again. Joel groans, stretching his arms above his head, grimacing at how stiff they must still be.  

“Oh, alright. I gotta take a piss, anyway,” he mutters, throwing the blankets off them.

“Oh good,” Tess says dryly. “Means it’s not all froze up like a Slurpee in there.”

She hears him chuff out a small laugh as he sits up, stands, walks naked towards the bathroom. She sees him glance briefly out of the window.

“Still kinda bad out there,” he comments.

“Suppose so,” Tess yawns. “But I can think of one good thing to come out of it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I got to tell Norman to fuck off.”