Chapter Text
The freezing water sloshed around Jonathan's ankles as he dragged the boat up onto the shore. Once it was far enough that he was confident the ebbing waves wouldn't carry it away, he turned and helped a bleary-eyed Spidey over the edge and into the sand. She stumbled on the uneven ground and mumbled a "Thank you…" as he steadied her by the elbow.
"Jonathan, can we just sleep here on the beach? I don't think I can keep my eyes open much longer."
He winced. They'd both been awake for more than forty-eight hours of pure, adrenaline-fueled stress, and he needed sleep just as badly as she did. But they couldn't afford to rest yet. They were too exposed on the open beach, and the infected could be hiding in the treeline just a few paces away. Luckily, he spotted a canoe shack out of the corner of his eye that looked sturdy enough to shelter in.
"Here, Spidey, just a little further, yeah?"
She slipped her hand into his, and he let her, and together they made their way over to the shack. Inside was empty. Spidey picked the corner with the least sand, sat against the wall, and let her head tip back with a huff, her eyes already closing. Jonathan glanced back at the wooden door, but Spidey's voice pulled him from his thoughts.
"I know what you're thinking. It's going to be okay. There aren't as many infected on the mainland, remember? Please, come sit with me…"
It's not just the infected I'm worried about, he thought, but he kept it to himself and joined Spidey on the floor.
She rested her head on his shoulder, and within minutes her breathing evened out, signaling that she'd fallen asleep. All at once, sleep felt a million miles away to Jonathan. Every rustle of wind in the trees outside made him think the infected were roaming nearby, and every shift Spidey made pulled him back to the lower facility, where they'd waited for Wifies to come back down the stairs and take them to the machine.
He took a deep breath.
We aren't in the city anymore. It's a crater in the earth now. Spidey is safe. We never have to go back.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax.
We're together, and that's all that matters.
~~~~
Sunlight was already well into forcing itself through the cracks in the walls when Jonathan awoke. He was lying on his back, squished between Spidey and the wall, her arm slung directly over his face with complete disregard for any personal bubble he might have hoped to maintain. He carefully returned the offending limb to its owner, eased himself upright as slowly as possible so as not to disturb her, and after giving Spidey one last glance, slipped out of the canoe shack.
The morning light caught him off guard, bright and warm. Blinking against it, he wandered further down the beach, where the only sounds were the soft drag of waves pulling back over the rocks and the occasional cry of some offended bird in the treeline. The sky was completely clear, an almost unnatural blue that stretched unbroken from one end of the horizon to the other. The water seemed entirely unbothered by the fact that a fairly catastrophic bomb had gone off somewhere beyond its edge.
A long stretch brought several sharp, uncomfortable pops from his back.
"Dear god… maybe Spidey's onto something about me being old." He rolled his shoulders with a grimace. "Damn, I feel about as flexible as a brick." He turned away from the ocean and studied the dense wall of foliage on the other side of the sand.
"Do I even remember the last time I was outside the city? What do I do now?" The treeline offered no answer. He glanced back at the shack. "What does Spidey want to do now that she's out?"
Will she even want to stay with me? She needed me when we were in that hell-hole, but now…
That thought got shoved down before it could take root. It would stay buried until the last possible moment.
He lifted a fist to stifle a cough.
The beach here was nothing like the one back in the city. Instead of pale uniform sand, the ground was made up of tiny pebbles in varying shades of brown and deep red, each one turning darker and shinier as the waves rippled over them. He crouched down and scooped up a handful, letting them sift slowly through his fingers. Different, he thought, but no less beautiful. There were no concrete buildings crammed into the skyline, no rot hanging in the air, no rusting husks of automobiles half-swallowed by vines.
4C would have loved this place.
After a few quiet minutes, he walked back towards the boat. He pulled up their packs and Wifies’s katana, and turned back toward the shack. He would wake Spidey, and together they would figure out their next steps. Whatever he'd intended to say, however, died the second he pushed open the door.
Spidey sat rigid in the corner, breath coming in short, shallow gasps. Tears streaked down her face, and her hand was pressed hard against her side. Jonathan crossed the distance in a single stride and dropped to the ground beside her.
"Hey. Spidey, look at me, please, take a breath. Is it your side? Can you hear me?" Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, and even when he passed a hand in front of her face, she didn't react.
"Shit." He exhaled. "I'm, uh… not sure what to do here. Do I hug you? Will that help?" He hesitated for only a instant before slowly leaning forward and wrapping his arms around her.
To his relief, the rigidness left her all at once, and she melted into him.
"I woke up and you weren't here." Her words came out broken, catching on themselves. "I thought you were still in the machine, and then the bomb went off. I thought I left you there—"
"Hey. It was just a nightmare." He thought he sounded steadier than he felt. "Look, see? We both made it. You got us both out. You got us the boat, remember?"
"The boat… yeah. I got the boat."
He smoothed her hair back from her face and held her quietly while she pulled herself back together, the sound of her breathing slowly evening out between them.
It was only once they'd both stood and dusted themselves off and the moment was over, that it occurred to him how naturally he slipped into comfort. Somewhere between everything that had happened, giving comfort had stopped being a reluctance, and though he was quite sure his attempts were still stilted and awkward, it had become, if he were being honest with himself, something close to second nature. He didn’t have the energy to piece together when it changed, but he supposed it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t have changed anything.
~~~~
It turned out they had beached themselves at some kind of campground. Beyond the treeline, little concrete lots had been swallowed almost entirely by grass, nature having long since decided they belonged to her now. Most were empty, save for a handful of lone trailers that were incredibly worse for wear. Each was secured with a rusted lock that Jonathan took one look at and decided tetanus wasn’t worth whatever loot might be inside. Empty fire pits were scattered in between, thinning out toward a dirt path that cut between the pines.
Spidey spotted the back of a cabin through the brush first. Circling around to the front revealed an entire overgrown cul-de-sac of little log cabins, half-hidden beneath years of encroaching ivy and low-hanging branches
"Guess we'll see if the last guests left the doors unlocked, shall we?"
Jonathan approached the closest cabin and gripped the handle. The door resisted at first, then shuddered open with a groan of swollen wood. A small cascade of dust sprinkled down from the frame. Spidey wrinkled her nose.
"Ugh, it's so musty."
"To be fair, there probably hasn't been any airflow in here for who-knows how long." He waved a hand through the disturbed dust and stepped inside.
The cabin was sparse but intact. Bunk beds lined the walls, a small cabinet stationed at the foot of each one, with narrow nightstands wedged in between. Spidey didn't miss a beat. She was already crouched in front of the nearest cabinet, pulling it open before Jonathan had even made it to the first nightstand.
"Anything?" he asked.
"A sock,” a pause, "one sock."
"Promising start."
The nightstands didn't offer much more. A warped paperback with half its cover torn away, a stubby candle burned nearly down to nothing, a scattering of coins that weren't worth the pocket space. He pushed the last drawer shut with his knee.
"I'm starting to think the last guests took everything worth taking on their way out."
"Maybe they didn’t have a lot to begin with." Spidey sat back on her heels and glanced around the room. She laughed, short and a little hollow. "Anyway! Nice place. It looks kinda like the place you showed me, that Boy Scouts’ place."
Jonathan gave a hum in acknowledgment. "Let's check the other cabins, yeah?"
~~~~
Jonathan groaned into his hand. Every cabin had turned out to be as useless as the last. He made his way to the last nightstand just as Spidey slipped through the doorway behind him, a little further back than usual, still peering around with quiet curiosity at everything they passed.
The top drawer held nothing. The bottom was nearly the same; he almost missed it entirely, his eyes skimming over the interior too quickly before something at the back caught the light. He reached in and pulled out a small silver box lined with abalone, its surface cool and smooth against his palm. He turned the little metal handle on the side. Nothing happened, no sound, no movement, just the soft resistance of a mechanism long since wound down.
"Hm." He tilted it toward the light. "I wonder what song it played."
He moved to set it back in the drawer.
"Wait, what's that?" Spidey appeared at his shoulder, seemingly out of nowhere, chin nearly resting on him to get a better look.
"Music box, I think. Doesn't play anymore though." He held it out to her.
She took it carefully, almost reverently, her thumb tracing the inlaid edges before she tucked it into her side bag. Jonathan almost opened his mouth. Something about space, about priorities, about carrying only what kept you alive, but she had already pivoted on her heel and moved to the other side of the cabin, and somehow the words didn't seem worth saying. He sighed and moved towards the door.
Right as he stepped out into the light, he caught it. Spidey's hand slipping away from her side a half second too late, the wince she'd been wearing smoothed over by the time she turned around.
"Ready to keep going?"
"Hmm." He glanced at the treeline, then back at her. "Yeah."
She fell into step beside him, and he let the silence stretch, turning it over quietly in his mind. The wound on her side had only ever received the crudest kind of attention; hasty and insufficient, the sort of patch job that bought time rather than solved anything. He had only managed to help her in the sparse minutes Wifies left them be.
He found himself doing the math without meaning to, tallying up the hours, the exertion, the blood she might have lost somewhere between him leaving her at the hostel and finding her at the point of a katana underground. Without proper supplies, there was precious little he could do but watch and hope, which had always been his least favorite combination.
He wondered, not for the first time, how many times they went back down into the M.O.O.N. bunker. She had always been adamant that each trip would be the last, standing at the top of that claustrophobic elevator in apprehension. But her words always seemed to carry with them the kind of certainty that almost made him believe it too. And yet circumstances had a way of pulling them both back, again and again, to every dim corridor and locked door of that wretched base. To Wifies. To the machine. To the remaining church and everything decrepit under it.
He wished he had never been one of those circumstances. His heart had never ached as it did when he told her to leave him and go back to the bunker.
But he would do it again. If it meant getting her further from all of it. Further from the machine, from the bomb, from every corner of that place, he would do it without hesitating; it wasn’t even a question.
~~~~
The cafeteria smelled like dust and old wood and nothing else. They moved through it quickly, checking every cabinet and shelf with the particular optimism of people who knew better, and came up empty in every one. The kitchen at the back yielded the same result. Bare shelves, empty drawers, a large pot that some animal had made a nest in.
"Nothing." Spidey closed the last cabinet with a hollow click.
"Nothing," Jonathan agreed.
They moved on.
The office near the front of the camp was small and cluttered with the kind of organized chaos that suggested someone had once cared very much about their filing system. A wooden desk dominated most of the space, its surface buried under a layer of dust and curling paperwork. Tacked to the wall above it, slightly crooked, was a faded poster for a film Jonathan recognized immediately.
"Oh, I saw that one in theaters."
Spidey turned to look at it, then slowly turned to look at him.
"In theaters."
"It was a good film."
"Jonathan." She gestured at the poster with the gravity of a formal argument. "Theaters stopped existing before I was born."
"And? It was still a good film."
She opened her mouth, thought better of it, but she was grinning, and Jonathan knew what she wanted to say. Before he could retort, an idea formed.
He crouched down behind the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer.
"Huh. I can’t believe I remembered that."
"What?"
He straightened up, a dusty but fully stocked medical kit in his hands. Spidey stared at it for a moment.
"How…" She crossed the room in three steps. "How did you know that was there?"
"Lucky guess?" He set the kit on the desk and unlatched it. "I mean, I didn’t know for sure it would be there. When I was in Boy Scouts, we used to sneak into the offices to look for the candy the ranger hid for himself in the bottom drawers." He paused, sorting through the kit's contents. "Med kit was always in the same spot, every single outpost. Never failed."
"You were such a troublemaker. What happened to that adventurous spirit? You’re all broody now."
"Eh… the apocalypse happened. Spidey, come here." He snapped a pair of gloves from the kit and moved toward her. "Counter. Up."
Spidey didn't move. She fiddled with the ends of her sleeves.
"It's fine, honestly. It's felt better since this morning."
"Spidey."
"I'm just saying, it's not as bad as it looks—"
"That is exactly the kind of thing people say right before it turns out to be exactly as bad as it looks. Counter."
She held his gaze for longer than necessary, clearly weighing her options, then scooted up onto the counter with reluctance. He moved to stand in front of her and reached for the hem of her shirt.
She leaned back slightly. "You know, I really think—"
"I really think you should let me look at it."
A long pause.
"What if we need these supplies later?"
"Then we’ll deal with that later."
She lifted the hem herself, which he suspected was less about cooperating and more about maintaining some degree of control over the situation. He peeled back the makeshift dressing with careful hands. The wound beneath was angry-looking, and he winced as the cut began to bleed again. She turned her face deliberately away and stared at the far wall while he worked.
"It's not that bad," he said, mostly to reassure her.
"I know," she said, in the voice of someone who had not known. "What about your shoulder?"
"Better, actually."
"Better as in better, or better as in you've decided not to think about it?"
"Better as in Wifies knew what he was doing." The words came out with some effort. "I'll give him that much."
She didn't push, which he appreciated. He kept his eyes on what he was doing, but the memory surfaced anyway, sitting useless against that wall, with Spidey still inside the machine while Wifies stitched him back together, and the long stagger to his feet to finally let her out.
"Besides a pull here and there, it hasn't given me any trouble." He smoothed out another piece of gauze and found himself thinking about the beach that morning. The water, the pebbles, and the question he'd shoved down prickled to the forefront of his thinking.
Spidey was fine. She was always going to be fine, no matter how scared she got if left alone. He knew she carried a strength she didn’t feel yet, and the thought sat warm and cold at the same time in his chest, the way it always did when he let himself think about what that might mean for him.
She had never mentioned whether or not she wanted to find her old caravan. The mountains she had rambled about for several hours seemed like a reasonable place to start looking, but would she even know how to get there from here, wherever here even was? It was definitely a different direction than where the highway had fed into the city, and though he'd done his best to hold onto some sense of direction out on the water, his mind had been somewhat preoccupied with pushing the little motor to its absolute limit and putting as much distance between them and the blast as possible.
He cleared his throat.
"Hey. Spidey." He kept his eyes on the bandaging. "Look, we’ve left the city now. You don’t need to— ah, what am I saying? I’d understand… if you want to find your old caravan…? You could? Y—You don't have to be stuck with me is what I'm trying to say, or if you wanted help finding them, I could— and then you could leave with them, if you— ah…"
Spidey’s forehead grew increasingly furrowed as Jonathan’s ramblings continued.
"You don't need me to protect you anymore. And the mainland has fewer infected, according to most of the bus people, so I know you'd be fine on your own, and if you have places to go—"
"Jonathan—"
"—or people to look for—"
"Jonathan."
"—or plans that didn't really involve me, I'd completely understand, I just wanted you to know that—"
"Jonathan, stop!" She grabbed his hands, which had begun to tremble somewhere between the bandaging and the rambling. He stopped. She took a shaky breath and dropped both their hands into her lap, holding them there.
"Even if my caravan was still out there," she started carefully, "we moved fast. Always did, to stay ahead of bandits. I wouldn't even know where to begin looking for them." Her thumb moved absently over his knuckles. "People were always coming and going anyway. It was a close group, but nobody stayed long enough to really be family." A beat. "It was just me and my dad. And now, uh…" she trailed off. Just when Jonathan thought she was done, she continued.
"I don’t have any place to be, that's not with you." She cracked a smile, meeting his eyes again. "You said you would never leave me again, did you already forget? Silly Jonathan, you really are getting old."
The threat of tears came without warning. He swallowed thickly and squeezed her hands instead.
"I could never forget, Spidey."
She let out a short, nervous laugh. "Geez, and people said I'm the one with separation anxiety." A beat, and then she ducked her head quickly. "Sorry— sorry, not the time."
The office felt smaller somehow, in a good way. He cleared his throat and turned back to the desk, beginning to repack the medical kit, when something paperclipped to a stack of papers caught his eye.
"Is that a fucking map?"
~~~~
Spidey pointed to a brown square in the corner of the map.
"What’s this? Could this have anything useful?"
"Ah… I suppose it's worth a shot. Which direction are we facing?" Jonathan turned and tried to spot the sun through the trees. "Okay, it's this way. Let’s go."
~~~~
The sun cast pink and orange rays through the branches by the time Spidey grabbed his sleeve.
"There! I see it, Jonathan, I see it!"
Just peeking above the pines, the silhouette of a fire watch tower rose against the darkening sky. The staircase that wound up the outside of it had seen better years. The wood was soft underfoot, which felt like it was more suggestion than structure, and every step announced their arrival with a groan that Jonathan didn't love.
Spidey muttered the entire way up.
"I'm just saying, whoever decided to put anything useful at the top of a very tall, very rickety staircase had a vendetta against people who don't like heights."
"You're doing fine."
"Easy for you to say…"
They emerged onto the narrow balcony that wrapped around the top, and Jonathan immediately noticed the railing. One section near the door bowed outward at an angle; the bolts barely holding it to the frame, the wood beneath them dark with rot. He gave it a wide berth without comment and moved to the small window beside the door, leaning in close to try to see past the drawn curtains.
"Anything?" Spidey asked from behind him.
"Can't tell." He straightened. "Curtains are closed."
"I'll get the door."
"Spidey, wait—"
She twisted the knob, and the door burst open.
The infected launched out before either of them could react, and Spidey stumbled back with a shriek, arms thrown up. Her back hit the railing, and the already-failing bolts gave way with a sharp crack. The pole lurched outward over nothing.
Jonathan's hand shot out on instinct. His fingers caught the strap of her bag, and he wrenched backward with everything he had, hauling her toward him as the infected's grip raked through the fabric of her skirt as it fell. For one suspended moment, there was nothing but its shrieks as it plummeted without its prize, and then the sickening crunch that followed.
Spidey stood very still against his chest, both of them breathing hard.
"Are you bitten? Spidey! Did it bite you?"
"No… it— it didn’t bite me, Jonathan." She buried her face in his shoulder, where he could feel her stuttering breath. "Don’t yell at me, please. I’m fine, see? You— you saved me."
Jonathan tightened his grip around her shoulders and tried to push the adrenaline down. His heart was going at a pace he was fairly certain wasn't medically advisable. He looked down at Spidey and exhaled,
"Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, Spidey. I just... uh, maybe let's listen at the doors before we open them from now on, yeah?"
Spidey nodded, and Jonathan’s pulse slowed to a pace where he felt like he could let go of her. Only then did he loosen his arms and let her find her footing.
This time, Jonathan went in first.
A quick sweep of the room turned up nothing, no movement in the corners, nothing behind the door, no more danger. A narrow cot sat against one wall, a desk against the other, and a radio occupied the windowsill beside a logbook and flashlight. A pair of binoculars hung from a hook by the door, and a topographic map of the surrounding area was pinned above the desk, its edges curled with age.
He ushered Spidey in.
She made a slow circuit of the room the way she always did, touching things lightly as she went, the logbook, the binoculars, the dial of the radio, which she turned experimentally. Nothing but static, bleeding in and out in long, shapeless waves. She turned it again. More static. She left it on anyway, a low, quiet hiss that filled the silence, and moved to sit on the cot. The springs made a horrible squeaking noise.
Jonathan moved to lean against the desk, arms folded, watching the last of the light fade through the trees outside. "It's getting dark. Looks like we're here for the night."
"Well." She bounced once, experimentally. The springs squeaked. "It's better than the shed on the beach."
"High praise."
Spidey hummed in agreement and leaned back until she was lying flat, legs still dangling off the edge, eyes on the ceiling. The radio murmured static between them.
"Jonathan, can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
She was quiet for bit, like she was arranging the words before she said them.
"Do you think you could ever settle down?"
He turned to look at her. She kept her eyes on the ceiling.
"I keep thinking about that house. The one we stayed in while we waited for Wifies." A pause. "I've never actually lived in a house. A real one, I mean, with the same walls every night and a door that was yours." The radio crackled softly. "The one we stayed at seems nice. Quiet. I try to imagine what it would feel like to wake up and already know where I was going to be that day. To not have to think about where the next meal was coming from, or whether the road ahead was clear, or whether we'd have to move on again before I'd even learned the shape of the place." She turned her head to look at him. "It’s stupid, I know. Is that a strange thing to want?"
"No," he said quietly. "It isn't."
Another promise rose up in the back of his mind, unrealistic in the same way the one on the bridge had been. He pushed off the desk anyway and crossed the room, sitting down on the edge of the cot beside her.
"Those mountains you told me about." He tried to sound casual, but didn’t really succeed. "Why don't we go there?"
Spidey sat up slightly, watching him.
"We could build something. Just the two of us." The words came easier once they'd started. "A real house. And I'll learn to garden— don't laugh—"
"I'm not laughing."
"—and you can fill every inch of it with whatever flowers you want. I'll build a wall around the whole thing, high enough that whatever infected are left up there won't get within a hundred yards of us." He glanced over at her. "You'd never have to think about where you're going next. Never have to worry about any of it again. What do you think?"
Spidey was staring at him. When she spoke, her voice was soft.
"We’d never have to worry about anything again." She lay back down, and a small smile settled over her face, her eyes closing. "That sounds so wonderful."