Chapter Text
‘Yeah I don’t think so.’
This, Ellie thinks, is her lesson.
Do not go into the hospital again.
Turn around.
Surrendering to life while a gun threatening to end it is leveled at her, one of fate’s funny tricks.
“Don’t think I need you alive for this,” Lina lies. At least, Ellie thinks she is bluffing. If she wasn’t, wouldn’t she have shot Ellie already?
Ellie weighs her odds. When faced with adversity, might as well go all the way into overtly cunty, right? She doesn’t want to die with her last words being ‘yes ma’am’.
To hell with it.
“Would be a shame if you did, though,” she replies from behind her teeth, taunting. She cuts her eyes to Charlie, and weighs the odds again. She certainly has her hands full, these days. But the way she sees it, maybe it ends here, maybe it doesn’t, but wouldn’t it be poetic for her to end where everyone always wanted her to, saving a world she never felt loved by?
She contemplates Charlie, and thinks maybe he knows. Maybe he understands. They’ve spent so much time together, and he’s been so alone. So has she. Quiet grief and pulling herself out by the skin of her teeth, accidentally bringing Charlie with her.
Isolation turns people feral and then, if they’re lucky, kind.
Charlie wanted to be alone, Ellie wanted to be dead, but here they are alive and together. It’s been months, Ellie is different. Charlie knows this, because he helped her.
Help is care, is love, is loyalty. Isn’t it?
Well, Ellie sure hopes so.
She turns back to Lina, and goes for ballsy. Go big or go home, isn’t that the saying?
“Thank you, Lina,” she starts, but a shot hits Lina’s metal hand with a brutal noise, and Ellie’s brave-and-ballsy plan immediately gets replaced by something much more effective. Sparks spit from the prosthetic’s knuckles, and the impact jerks Lina’s wrist sideways; the muzzle skates off Ellie’s line and goes off in a useless round into the sky.
Lev yells, and Ellie watches as Abby hauls him behind her, quickly breaching the distance between them but Ellie’s already moving—two steps, close enough to see Lina’s pupils flare in surprise before she slams the butt of her short pistol into the corner of Lina’s head, right at the temple. A wet sound and Lina’s stance buckles, body dropping like a stone.
Ellie looks at Charlie, gun cocked and still loaded, who is looking behind him in confusion at—
“Cam!”
Who barrels in from the western street, sweat streaking his temples, shirt torn at the collar, not a bite to be seen, gun smoking.
Help is care. Is love. Is loyalty.
Ellie wants to kiss Cam, but the gunshot has the nearby infected turning, and it’s like a shared-organism: The aggregation sways, reorienting.
Towards them.
Abby curses a few feet away from Ellie, who doesn’t look in her direction, blinking at Cam, startled.
Still, it’s kind of funny, how her and Abby keep orbiting around each other. In hospitals and on islands and in snow-filled mountains and around a hoard of infected.
Every damn time, Abby happens to Ellie all over again.
“Where were—”
“People,” Cam pants, cutting her off. “Got them to head towards the Botanic Garden. It’s the safest spot I could think of, a terrain they can make use of, at least.”
Charlie’s face tightens in disbelief. “The gardens?”
“The infected can’t all funnel through the brush, they’ll have to go one by one, it gives them a chance. They can’t see for shit, they’re attracted to noise.”
Charlie and Cam seem to go through a long discussion with their eyes that Ellie doesn’t understand at all, and then Charlie groans, hauling Lina’s unconscious body up on his shoulders as Cam drops to a knee in front of him and lays down a few short bursts against the oncoming infected.
“There’s an old lighthouse with a foghorn up there,” Charlie shouts at them, turning east.
Ellie looks at Cam, then Charlie, then Abby.
A foghorn…?
At her confused gaze, Cam rolls his eyes, stands up, and starts moving backwards, shooting as he explains. “Noise attracts them, maybe smell. We lure them up and pick them off!”
“There are hundreds of them,” Abby counters, though she and Lev follow Charlie regardless. It wouldn’t make sense for them to stay here, anyway. In the middle of a town and with absolutely no edge on the school of infected, might as well try something stupid.
“And they’ll kill us all if we don’t do something,” Charlie snaps back without heat. “If we want a shot at getting off this rock, we need them on it.”
Abby passes Ellie in the shuffle, and their eyes catch for just a second. Her hand brushes against Ellie’s arm, a quick, relieved squeeze, hey, before letting go. Ellie doesn’t remember the last time someone checked in on her like that. It makes her ribcage tingle.
“We don’t have boats,” Lev says.
“Casino’s got inflatables we can blow up, get people in,” Charlie says.
“They’re all headed for the Wrigley Memorial,” Abby replies. “If we pull the infected up there and call people down, they’re going to meet in the middle.”
Just then, a swimmer, attracted by the noise, lunges at Abby—tooclosetooclosetooclose, Ellie doesn’t think. She runs and meets it elbow first, feeling cartilage give under the point. She follows the hit with her knife. Once, twice, a third slice and it collapses, splashing her boots with water gore. She looks down: its eyes are milked over, glassy and unfocused.
Abby had shouted a second earlier, hadn’t she? The hurricane had brought a capharnaum of noise, trees falling and roofs lifting, landslides. And Cam had said…
Ellie looks down at her gore-soaked shoes, and sighs, face grim. Right beside her, Abby frowns, taking in her reluctant expression.
“Wha—” she looks down at the infected, its dead-seeing eyes, then back up at Ellie, now mirroring her sour expression. She makes a face, already half-resigned.
“No,” which just sounds like really?
She grumbles, but she lowers herself all the same and pulls Lev in her front of her, dressing him in whatever the infected are made out of, that smells like the reddish-brown gelatinous slime she could find at the bottom of the Jackson Lake during the summer combined with, well. Rotten corpse.
“You got anything else?” Charlie asks, squatting to pull blobs of gore and smother himself and Lina in it.
Ellie quickly washes herself and her clothes with gore as well, down to her short hair, her neck, gagging as she does. She nods at the huge backpack by Lina’s feet. “I don’t, but she might.”
It takes a second, turning the backpack upside down and fitting themselves with every bit of artillery they can, rummaging at the bottom of the bag where Charlie yanks a cylinder from his pack in victory, thumb on the spoon. “Oh, goodie.”
Ellie looks up, and she and Charlie exchange a can’t hurt to give it a go look.
“Does it still work?” Abby asks.
Charlies blows a raspberry and brings the smoke grenade to eye level, it. “One way to find out.”
Abby’s hand is already on Lev’s collar, guiding him back, away from the hoard and towards the hill where Cam has now taken the lead.
Charlies hikes Lina higher up over his shoulders, and his thumb leaves the spoon, throwing the grenade in front of them.
The smoke hits the ground almost immediately and thickens, red and greasy.
“Will it change anything?” Lev asks.
Ellie and Charlie reply at once, “No idea.”
Abby clicks her tongue. “Let’s move.”
They do, Charlie following behind, Ellie closing the march.
This is, by far, the messiest battle Ellie’s ever been a part of. All of the flying by the seat of their pants, Ellie’s used to that. What she isn’t used to, however, is caring about so many people in the same place, in the same amount of danger.
Still, they punch through the smog, feet slipping on guts-and-algae-slick stone. Ellie tries not to think about where all of this comes from, though the stench is hard to ignore. It’s in her throat, everywhere she turns.
Ahead, the slick grip Abby has on Lev falters and Ellie rushes over, pushing Lev up when he slips, forcing him to scramble and keep up with Abby ahead while she retreats back, the first barrier between her family and those hideous things.
Behind, the infected’s wet footsteps speed up, then stutter, confused (maybe) by the redness and the sudden lack of pandemonium. Charlie fires blind, not killing (and how would he, they can’t see anything) so much as herding.
Up, up, up they go, and Ellie loves heights, she does, but the terrifying sounds of hundreds of infected following, slipping, falling, coming back, is kind of putting a dent in her happy. So does her shoulder where teeth sunk in. It hurts. She clamps a hand there, feels her heartbeat, and keeps going.
They’re fast, even with Charlie carrying Lina’s dead weight, and within fifteen minutes of taking the wild path, full of brush and rocks that keep pushing the infected further and further back, they stumble upon the siren shack.
It’s a little cinderblock just ahead of a falling apart lighthouse that is so overgrown Ellie had never noticed, padlock rusted to the color of old blood, and two huge horns on its roof.
“You know how to open that?” Abby asks.
“Yup.” Cam cocks his gun and aims.
The padlock explodes.
Ellie whistles, because it’s cool, and they stumble in.
The inside smells like mouse piss and wet rot, but Ellie blinks and grabs around for her flashlight. “Fuck—”
Light flickers on, and Lev smiles sheepshily at her from over the ray of light. “It was kind of cool…”
“You stole my flashlight?” Ellie’s tone is half-surprised, half-admirative.
“Is now the time?” Abby interrupts.
It takes less than a few seconds of looking around for them to locate a breaker box with a fuse that rattles like a loose penny. Ellie narrows her eyes, and tries to reach in. It becomes evident almost immediately that she isn’t going to be successful.
“Lev!”
He rushes over, flashlight held up in his small fingers.
“Seat the fuse, here?” she tells him, and Lev hands her the flashlight so he can follow her instructions as she walks him through seating the glass fuse with a rude push of his thumb.
“If they’re not all following us already,” Charlie warns from his position guarding the door, Lina’s back propped up against the frame, “they’ll rush over as soon as this turns on.”
“Do we yet have a glorious escape plan?” Abby asks.
Charlie shrugs. “Sure. Make one on the way?”
“Sounds fun,” Ellie mutters, and, checking Lev has his hand removed from the breaker box, she throws the knife switch.
The siren winds up like something coughing up a century of disuse—thin, then thicker, then a full-body howl that vibrates their ribcages. Ellie swears she can feel it in her teeth. She rushes out, and sure enough, downhill, some still half-caught in the smog, the aggregation shifts as one, infected swimmers turning as if pivoted by a single hand. The whole school bends its spine toward the sound.
“Time to go,” Charlie says cheerily from right behind her. He looks at the group. “Up?”
Abby looks around, stomps in a weird circle with a calculating frown on her face and eventually points to where the ridge path funnels into a natural choke point where brush and rock pinch the way.
“There?”
Within seconds they’re running up, one by one through the narrow path where the infected will clog themselves up. As she goes, Abby keeps stomping, which isn’t a great idea because the rain has made the ground muddy and slippery and—
Ellie pauses a moment, light hitting home, and she bends to knock on the ground.
“Soft,” she realizes quietly.
Cam’s eyes cut sideways at Ellie, and he crouches, too, fingers digging into the slope. It crumbles between his knuckles when he pulls his hand out. “Shit. It’ll go if we give it a push.”
“We need to get to some sort of solid ground before pushing,” Abby says, confirming her absurd, insane plan, all the while corralling Lev higher up the path.
They scramble uphill another forty meters, lungs burning, until Abby stomps and stops, then plants them on firmer stone where a huge boulder sits half-buried in the mud.
The infected are slow-coming but far superior in numbers. The five of them—six if you count Lina—wouldn’t be able to take them, no matter how slow the narrow opening. It would take hours, and that means they would get tired. Tired leads to mistakes, and mistakes leads to Ellie’s teeth-branded shoulder.
Abby’s idea is genius.
Mad, but genius.
Maddeningly genius.
Charlie sets Lina’s limp body on a large rock higher up and comes back down to assess the breaking point around the boulder with Abby and Cam.
The first infected stagger into view, and Ellie whistles at Lev. He rushes over, and together they scramble up a jut of rock, both of them perching up like mountain goats, and they start shooting into the slow-rising fray.
Lev’s hands shake where he grips his newly gifted rifle, curtesy of Charlie, and all of his shots are too wide. He’s aiming down, too low, and they’re too far for him to get lucky.
“Breathe out,” Ellie says, as calmingly as possible. “Then squeeze. Not before. You’re doing great.”
He adjusts, exhaling, then fires too fast and clips a leg.
“Okay, good,” Ellie praises. “Aim higher. Leave the bullet room to drop.”
Leave the bullet room to drop
She can’t believe she’s back here again, circling, now teaching Lev something Tommy taught her years ago.
This fucking, endless circle.
The next shot is still too wide but closing, and after a few tries, he hits a neck. The infected swimmer topples, and two more behind it crash over the body, limbs tangling in the mud.
“Yes!”
Just below them, Cam, Charlie and Abby are scanning the choke below where the mud is soaked with water weight and the half-buried boulder that could save their lives.
“Does anyone know how to do this?” Abby asks.
Cam flicks a knife out and starts hacking at the roots around the boulder, using his hands to dig. “We cut as much as we can, and then… one big push?”
That’s as good a plan as they have, and so the three of them start digging at roots, pushing with their hands, dislodging rocks and creating discomfort within the mud around the boulder. Pushing down.
Abby stands up and stomps around in rhythm, loosening the earth.
“Stop!” Charlie yells after a few minutes, and they all turn to him. “I can feel it,” he says, which doesn’t mean anything to Ellie, but this is the plan, and they have no other, and it’s push or die.
So.
Abby, Cam and Charlie exchange a look. “On three?”
Ellie spends a very short second looking away from the infected crawling uphill to look at Abby.
Mud-streaked, hair slick and dark with gore, arms corded and trembling but solid against the boulder. She’s braced like a pillar, face scraped, cheek purple where something caught her, jaw clenched so tight Ellie can almost hear her teeth grind.
She looks like she’s already fought ten battles and has ten more in her.
Ellie hates the awe it inspires, hates the recognition of having seen her like this before in a past so tangled she can’t pull it apart from what she’s seeing now.
Abby looks like everything Ellie has always admired about Joel: built to carry, built to survive.
Built to trust.
“One—two—”
“Three!”
They throw their whole weight against the boulder, and their luck turns. The boulder lurches, then goes, crashing down into the gully while they rush up where Ellie and Lev are, waiting.
For a moment, nothing.
Nothing, nothing—
—Then the earth groans.
And lets go.
Mud, rock, and water rush downward, and it’s almost instantaneous, the way the slide picks infected like driftwood, swallowing them under soil and stone.
The ground shakes beneath Ellie’s boots; she drops to a crouch, one hand pressed flat, feeling the vibration echo through her bones. She closes her eyes, and feels another hand tangling itself with hers, then a smaller one in her other hand. She holds.
For a moment, the whole hill trembles like it might take them with it as the land slides, and then as soon as it began, it’s over, and it’s silent.
Below, the choke is gone, buried under a writhing heap of mud and half-crushed bodies, some still moving but unable to go anywhere, trapped.
Charlie slams a fresh mag home, and turns to Ellie.
He nods towards Lina.
“So. Care to explain what the fuck?”