Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s eerily quiet when Joel wakes up on the floor of the motel room on the outskirts of Kansas City. For the first time since he’s known her, Ellie’s not directly in his line of sight when he opens his eyes. She’s just behind the bedroom door, thrilled by the idea of “sleeping in a real hotel,” she’d called it last night, but the fear clouds his mind fast— would he have heard if she took off on her own to explore, trying to be helpful and find supplies and ending up hurt or kidnapped, Sam wouldn’t have been able to hear if anything had happened, and, fuck— they never checked the kid for bites—

He’s on his feet and nearly throwing the door open. His ears ring and he rests his hand uselessly on the doorknob. The two kids are both still sound asleep, snuggled together in one bed, Ellie’s arm draped protectively over Sam’s little shoulders, the comic book they’d been up too late reading last night fallen to the ground.

There’s a tightness in his chest, the same tightness that’s been there from the moment he left the Fireflies’ headquarters in Boston, just a few days ago, although it feels like several lifetimes ago.

Now there’s two of them that he’s going to fail.

“They still asleep?” Henry asks, startling him.

Three of them to fail.

Joel nods, stepping into the room, and something like instinct has him picking the comic book up from the floor, opening Ellie’s backpack to put it inside. She’s careful with her stuff, the little of it that she has, he’s pretty sure she practically has an itemized inventory in her head of what’s in her backpack, and she wouldn’t have left the comic behind. It’s the same instinct that had him placing his jacket over her when she was shivering in her sleep in the woods outside of Boston.

He glances back over at the kids and Ellie’s awake, her head still on the pillow, watching him with curiosity.

“Why are you going through my shit?” she asks, although there’s no malice in her voice.

He holds up the comic book and sticks it into the bag, zipping it back up. “Left your shit on the ground, putting it away so I don’t have to hear you whine about forgetting it. Time to get up.”

Ellie nods, gently shaking Sam’s shoulder to wake him up, too.

By the time they’ve packed up and the kids have split a can of mixed vegetables for breakfast, it’s clear that Ellie’s got some sort of scheme in her mind, glancing over at Joel and Henry every couple of seconds.

“So, we’ve been thinking,” she says eventually, a rehearsed enthusiasm to her voice, “and it would actually make a lot of sense for us all to travel together.”

She glances over at Sam, who nods and writes down a phrase on his message board.

Safety in numbers.

Ellie starts to say more, Joel’s pretty sure that she’s got a whole speech planned out in her head, but Henry cuts her off.

“We already agreed on it last night,” he says, signing the words as he says them, the way he almost always does when Sam’s in the room. Sam’s face lights up immediately.

“Oh,” Ellie says, crossing her arms across her chest. “Nice.”

Henry smiles. “Did you wanna give us the rest of the speech you had planned, or—?”

“No,” she says. “You could’ve told me, though.”

This is directed at Joel, an irritated, annoyed edge to her tone. The man he was twenty years ago would have taken the time to acknowledge it, figure out what was going on, do all the active listening that the Parenting Your Preteen books said you were supposed to do.

But now, he doesn’t warrant it with a response.

Not wanting to waste any more daylight, they leave as soon as everything is packed up. Henry heads out first, Sam following closely behind him. As Joel moves to follow them, Ellie grabs the sleeve of his coat, her eyes round with concern.

“Do we tell them?” she whispers, looking pointedly down at her arm and back at him.

He frowns. “What did you agree to?”

She sighs and rolls her eyes. “No, I know, but, if we’re—”

“Ellie,” he snaps, harsher than he needs to be. “Enough.”

She scowls at him, but she doesn’t argue. She walks ahead out into the early morning sun, and he follows, shutting the door behind him.

—

It’s taking them a long fucking time to get anywhere. Sam’s always been pretty good at following directions, and Ellie seems like a pretty capable kid, but they’re both excited and still running on some adrenaline from the night before, and it’s not their fault, Henry keeps reminding himself, they’re kids.

Still, he’s about to pull his hair out when Ellie slows down to a stop for probably the tenth time since they left a couple hours ago to take Sam’s slate and write down a question. The last time he’d glanced over, they were deep in the throes of some discussion about the aliens in their comic books.

“Ellie,” Joel says, clearly annoyed, too, “let’s save the conversation for when we’re stopped.”

“No, that’s not fucking fair,” Ellie snaps, glancing up and walking faster to catch up. “You get to have a conversation whenever you want just because you can walk and talk at the same time, but we can’t?”

Joel raises an eyebrow. “I think we’d all be fine with a little peace and quiet while we walk.”

Ellie pouts, but she shuts up, giving Sam an exaggeratedly annoyed look, which he giggles at. He wanders over to the curb and walks with one foot on the curb and one foot off. Henry shakes his head and gestures for him to get both feet back onto the road, which Sam does, copying Ellie’s sullen look.

They’ve gotten out into the suburbs of KC and are walking through a desolate subdivision, which shows nearly no signs of the devastation of the past two decades, besides the overgrown plants and the cracked pavement and the spray-painted FEDRA markings on the doors on the rows of two-story houses. It’s not unlike the neighborhood that Henry has vague memories of from before the outbreak, watching Dora the Explorer on the boxy TV in the living room and riding his tricycle around in circles in the driveway.

“You’ll have to learn sign language so you two can walk and talk,” he says to Ellie.

She nods in agreement. “How’d you learn it?”

“We found books on it when he was little. Sam’s got one in his bag.”

Ellie grins, adjusting the straps of her backpack. “Sick.”

Henry’s kept the sign language dictionary in Sam’s bag since he was big enough to carry his own backpack. The thought of him being lost and alone and unable to communicate with anyone terrifies him. The message board was one of the best things he’s found, now that Sam’s old enough to be able to spell well enough to communicate with other people. But his reliance on that little piece of cardboard and plastic brings other anxiety, fears of it getting broken or lost. He’s always been a worrier. “Tomorrow will worry about itself,” his mom used to say when he’d spiral like that as a kid, which never really assuaged any fears that he had, just made him wonder what tomorrow had in store that it had to worry about.

He shakes the thought off as Sam tugs on his hand, his brow furrowed.

“When are we stopping?” he signs, making his eyes big.

Henry rolls his eyes. “We only left two hours ago.”

“Is he tired?” Joel asks, not understanding the signs themselves, but clearly recognizing the gist of what they’re saying.

Henry shakes his head anyways. “He’ll be fine, just whining.”

He gives Sam a pointed look as he says and signs the last word, and Sam makes a face back at him in return.

“Well,” Joel says, unconvinced, “when he needs a break, let me know.”

He says it in his typical asshole voice, as Ellie called it, but he doesn’t seem annoyed or irritated by the fact that they’re going to be slowed down by Sam’s little legs, which is something that Henry had worried about last night after they agreed to travel together.

“I think we’ll need to head east of here to get closer to the freeway,” Henry says, hoping to at least add something valuable to them tagging along while he can, although his knowledge of geography any further north than here is pretty spotty.

Joel frowns, shaking his head slightly. “Don’t wanna get too close to where there might be people, I’d reckon we’re not the only ones who got out of there after that shit show last night, and you never know what kind of people they might be.”

“Don’t wanna wander too far out and get lost in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, either, though,” Henry says, which Ellie snorts at.

“We ain’t gonna get lost,” Joel grumbles, holding up a hand in a signal that it’s the end of the discussion, a gesture that reminds Henry of his dad. He’s reminded of the conversation, or the lack thereof, that they had yesterday— not Ellie’s father, but someone’s.

—

They stop for the night in a park close to the city limits. Wyandotte County Lake Park, a weathered wooden sign reads, nearly hidden behind overgrown weeds. Ellie stops to tie her shoe for what feels to her like the ten millionth time since they left. If she’d known she was going to be walking across the fucking country, she would have worn her gym shoes instead of her Converse.

“Used to be hiking trails,” Joel says, pointing out the small rivets of dirt in the ground branching off in different directions from the main entrance to the park. It’s hard to tell that they once were paths, they’re mostly covered by grass now.

“Did you ever go hiking, before?” Ellie asks, glancing up at him.

She catches a quick, distant, almost soft look in his eyes, before he clears his throat and nods.

“Now and again,” he says, gruff as ever.

“You and your brother?” she asks.

Joel nods again, not elaborating.

The four of them walk past the paths and into the woods for a while, Sam pausing once to point out a frog in the mud, which hops away at the sight of them. Eventually, Joel stops in a small clearing, deciding that they’re far enough in that they’ll go unnoticed.

They don’t start a fire, but they do light up the Sterno and gather around it to cook up cans of corn chowder and green beans from Bill’s house that Joel had stashed in his backpack.

The sun hasn’t quite disappeared from the sky yet after they eat, so Ellie sits down on a fallen log and takes out her journal, which she hasn’t touched since she was back in Boston. She hadn’t even meant to take it with her to the mall, it was just in there from school the day before. She hadn’t really had anyone to talk to after Riley left, so she’d spent a lot of the small windows of free time that they were allotted at school drawing while the other girls were chatting and hanging out with each other.

Sam sits down next to her, peering over to see what she’s drawing. She angles the notebook so that he can see the page she’s opened it to, a drawing of a triceratops.

He takes out his slate and writes, You’re really good at drawing.

Ellie smiles, gesturing for him to hand her the slate, and writes back, I’ve had a lot of practice.

Sam scoots in closer to watch her. She finishes up some shading on the dinosaur’s horns and turns to a new page, digging out the other pencil from her backpack, handing it to him and placing the notebook between the two of them so that they both can draw.

He starts to draw a person, and it’s pretty good for a kid his age, definitely better than the stick figures she used to draw in the margins of her school books when she was little.

She doesn’t have many real memories of being that little herself, but she knows that it was lonely. Until she got moved up to the military school last year, when she turned thirteen, she’d been one of the older kids in the orphanage for a while. The little kids all liked her because she would draw pictures for them and sometimes would join their games of tag or kickball. A lot of the other kids her age thought the younger kids were annoying, and some of them were brats, but most of them just liked having someone talk to them.

Sam’s added a cape and a mask to his person and has written a caption at the top. Super Sam.

“Is that—?” She gestures to the mask on the superhero and then to the mask painted on over his eyes.

He grins and nods. She starts to draw a person, too, intentionally not making it too good, it’s not like she’s trying to outshine an eight-year-old.

She thinks at first about making it herself like Sam’s character, but it’s not really a thought she wants to entertain for too long, being a superhero. Fungus Girl or some shit like that. She adds dark, wavy hair to the character and writes Daniella Star above her on the page, and underneath, adds the words The Battle of the Robots From Planet X.

Sam smiles and starts adding robots to the drawing, adding what look like laser beams coming out of Super Sam’s eyes.

Last night, he’d woken up her up with his tossing and turning, and she shook him to wake him up. He’d turned to her with big scared eyes and started signing frantically before realizing that she couldn’t understand what he was saying, but she could tell that he was scared, he’d had a bad dream, and it wasn’t exactly rocket science to figure out what he might have had a nightmare about. She still saw the horde rushing out of that sinkhole every time she closed her eyes, too. Not sure what else to do, she got out her flashlight and they looked at an issue of Savage Starlight together until he fell back asleep.

The past few days have been so strange and exhausting that she’s fallen dead asleep and her brain hasn’t mustered up the energy to dream, but she’s had plenty of nightmares herself over the past few weeks, more than she can ever remember having before. Every night when she was with the Fireflies, she had horrible dreams about the mall, getting attacked over and over, the infected’s weight on top of her and its horrible rotting stench filling her nostrils, watching Riley start to turn, the tendrils creeping their way up under her skin, her breathing getting jerky and weird. Sometimes, in the dreams, Ellie would turn, too, but usually shit worked out for her the same way it did in real life: alone, holding the gun.

She bites the inside of her cheek, then stops herself and takes a breath, in for four seconds, hold for two, out for six, something one of the nicer teachers she had back at the orphanage had taught her when she was little.

“I’ll take first watch,” Joel’s saying to Henry, who nods in return.

“I can help keep watch,” Ellie pipes up quickly, looking up from her journal.

They both look up from the road map they’ve been poring over and give her a skeptical look. Sam leans back to get a better look at what she’s saying, she realizes, and she feels a pang of guilt at how left out he must feel, he can’t even eavesdrop on their conversations.

“If I help,” she goes on, “then you can both rest longer.”

Joel looks like he’s about to say something snarky and condescending about that, but Henry cuts him off.

“Why don’t we see how it goes tonight,” he says, “and if we need your help, we’ll talk about it, okay? At least one of us should be fully rested in the morning, right?”

It still feels condescending, after she was moments away from having to fend for herself and look after Sam alone if Joel hadn’t made it back out of that house and if that tiny clicker hadn’t taken that crazy lady out before she could shoot Henry barely twenty-four hours ago, but she nods anyways.

It gets dark out fast, and a chill creeps into the air as the sun disappears from the sky. Ellie goes to grab her jacket out of her backpack, slipping it on and zipping it all the way up to her chin.

“We’d better get to sleep now so we can head out early,” Henry says, which Sam makes a face at.

Joel gets up, his gun in hand, and Sam takes his sleeping bag and brings it over by Henry, unfurling it and getting in and curling up close to his brother. Henry reaches over to rest a hand on his back and Sam closes his eyes, his face relaxing.

Something about it makes her chest ache, reminding her of what Riley had told her about how Ellie didn’t know what it’s like to have a family, to belong.

She takes her flashlight out and digs through her bag to find her book, spotting the glint of Riley’s metal dog tags as she does. The thought of getting out her joke book, ironically, suddenly feels unbearably sad, so she gets out a Savage Starlight instead, one of the ones that she traded with Sam.

“Ellie,” Joel says, glancing back at her from where he’s standing a few paces off. “You need to get to sleep.”

She frowns. He hadn’t given a shit the other night when she had gotten out her flashlight to read her joke book, but then again, that was back when they were driving there and not walking. They’d probably be in Wyoming by now if they hadn’t gotten ambushed, maybe if she’d been able to read that fucking map.

She lifts her head up and tucks the comic book back into her bag, digging out the dog tags and her knife instead, clutching them to her chest and curling up into a ball, squeezing her eyes shut.

—

Sam wakes up disoriented by a cold breeze and the hard ground beneath him, forgetting for a moment why he’s outside in a sleeping bag. He read a book once about kids who go camping, which his mom told him was something that people used to do before the outbreak. He never considered that he’d get to go on a camping trip himself.

It’s still dark out, but everybody else is already awake, although Ellie’s still in her sleeping bag, too, sitting up and watching Henry and Joel pack up their campsite with bleary eyes. She looks about as tired as Sam feels. His feet hurt and he’s hungry and he’d really like to go back to sleep, but he knows he’s not supposed to whine about that.

Instead, he gets out of his sleeping bag and rolls it up, although not tight enough for it to fit through the straps at the bottom of his backpack. He scrunches up his nose and flings it back open. Henry steps in from seemingly out of nowhere and reaches over to to re-roll it for him.

“I can do it myself,” Sam signs, stomping his foot, which he knows is a babyish thing to do even though he’s trying hard not to seem like a baby. He moves out of the way anyways, carefully watching the way that Henry rolls it back up tightly, patting the edge occasionally so the bundle stays flat and neat.

They have beef jerky, which is disgusting, for breakfast, and leave shortly after. As they walk on, heading past the lake and out of the park, there’s a few RVs and camper vans parked in the grass a little ways ahead.

“Should we look for any supplies?” Henry asks.

Joel nods, and Ellie says something in response. Sam’s okay at lip-reading sometimes, but he’s already discovered that Ellie talks way too fast when she’s excited about something, which is most of the time, to be able to follow. He glances over at Henry to translate for him.

“She says that we can split up and scope them all out,” he explains with a shrug. “You two can go check one out, that’s fine.”

Sam nods eagerly. Joel walks up to the door of the camper and holds up a hand for them to wait, raising his gun and stepping in and taking a look around before signaling for the kids to go in. He’s giving Ellie directions, which she’s rolling her eyes at, then nodding and gesturing for Sam to follow her.

Sam glances around the camper as he steps inside. There’s a regular steering wheel and seats up front, but the rest of the van is like a little house: a dining table with benches on either side of it, a tiny kitchen area, a cramped, unmade bed in the back. He’s never seen anything like it before, although, he’s starting to realize, he’s never really seen much of anything in the few square blocks of the Kansas City QZ where he’s lived his whole life.

On the ground next to the table, there’s a kid-sized backpack decorated with a picture of a yellow, rectangular cartoon character wearing a tie. Sam looks over at Ellie and sees the same thought that he’s having written across her face, that the bag belonged to a kid who’s probably long gone. He unzips the bag and digs through its contents while she goes off to the kitchenette.

In the backpack, there’s a couple sets of clothes about his size, a figurine of a funny little green alien with big ears holding a green sword, a small lantern, a plastic compass, and a small paperback book: Fabulous Facts About the Fifty States. He transfers all of them into his own backpack, except for the lantern, its batteries long ago corroded. He thumbs through the pages of the book, landing on the one about Kansas, a picture of the Rosedale Arch next to the chapter heading.

Ellie comes back over a few moments later holding her own finds, a gray hoodie with a line of trees printed on it over her arm and a bunch of cans almost about to tumble out of her arms. She sets them down on the little table and looks at the book in his hands.

“Cool,” she says, giving a thumbs up to make what she’s saying clear.

“Cool,” he signs back, holding his thumb to his chest and wiggling his fingers.

Ellie grins, repeating the sign, then reaches for him to hand her the slate and writes, You have to teach me all the words.

He nods in agreement. He pauses for a moment, then writes, Why are you and Joel going to Wyoming?

Ellie frowns for a moment, then writes, It’s a classified government secret.

She raises her eyebrows and Sam rolls his eyes. She thinks for a moment, biting her lip, before writing more.

People who knew my mom are out west and Joel’s brother might know where they are. It IS kind of a classified secret haha. I’ll tell you when Joel says it’s okay to.

She glances over at him, shrugging apologetically, and he nods, he understands. When Henry was working with Michael, and then later, when he was collaborating with FEDRA people to get Sam’s medicine, Sam wasn’t really supposed to know about any of it, but he did. He’s okay at lip-reading.

When they had to leave their old apartment when things started to get bad with the resistance, one of his favorite issues of Savage Starlight got lost, but it was about Daniella Star teaming up with Captain Ryan to defeat these evil cyborgs.

“We’ll need to collaborate on this mission,” Captain Ryan says when they team up.

He’d asked Henry about that word, not quite understanding what it had to do with both killing robots and getting in trouble for working with the bad guys.

“Doesn’t always mean you’re doing anything bad,” Henry had told him, “it just means you’re working together with someone.”

Sam smiles, a thought occurring to him.

We’re collaborators now, he writes, holding the slate up so that Ellie can read it.

She frowns for a moment, not following, and he gestures to himself and to her, and then out the door to where Joel and Henry are going through the other RVs, and she laughs and nods.

As Ellie goes to put the canned food in her bag, he opens his book up to the map of the fifty states in the back and traces his finger from Kansas through Nebraska to Wyoming. The states all seem small, with the whole map sized to fit on one page of a paperback book, but he’s pretty sure that in real life, Wyoming is really far away.

—

They’ve compromised, walking close enough to the highway that it’s visible, deep enough into the brush that they shouldn’t be visible to anyone else heading out of the city.

The kids have darted up ahead, Ellie’s made up some game that seems like combination of Red Light Green Light and Mister Fox using complicated hand signals. She’s a clever kid, Joel recognizes that she’s trying to make it easier for the little boy to pick up the pace, but his mind is already spiraling with the possibilities of all of the fates that they could meet being out of arm’s reach.

“Get on back from there,” he calls.

Ellie slows down and looks back at him with chagrin, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips, but she elbows Sam and gestures for him to wait for him and Henry to catch up. He’s reminded with a pang of another little girl on another hiking trip, a far less perilous trip than this on one of the trails outside of Austin, scampering up a boulder that screamed a broken collar bone or broken ankle to him, but she made it down unscathed, rolling her eyes at his worries. Like every memory of her, it’s tinged with the reminder of how, ultimately, all of the worrying he did wasn’t enough, still left her dead, blood staining her favorite t-shirt.

Ellie and Sam are waiting when they catch up, back to giggling over some inside joke. He shakes his head, shouldering his backpack and forging ahead.

Chapter Text

“Okay, can we be done with the boring shit for tonight?” Ellie asks, leaning in a bit closer to the warmth of the campfire and pulling her journal out from her backpack, opening it to a page with the title Sign Language. “I wrote down another list last night.”

Over the past week, at Ellie’s insistence, Henry has been teaching her and Joel sign language. Mostly, at Joel’s insistence, survival basics: stop, wait, get down, hide, run. Ellie’s been more interested in less practical but far more interesting vocabulary: names of planets and dinosaurs and science fiction terms from the comics that she and Sam love. Most of those aren’t words that Henry knows a sign for and Ellie’s learned to finger-spell them instead, which she’s picked up impossibly fast.

Joel glances over at the most recent list in her journal and shakes his head. “You don’t need to know any of those.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “How am I supposed to communicate, then?”

He gives her a tired look. “Why are you needing to swear at an eight-year-old to communicate with him?”

“I’m not swearing at him.” Ellie shakes her head, a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “What the fuck, what kind of person do you think I am?”

The four of them are sat around the fire inside a shallow sandstone cave where they’re camping out for the night. There’s drawings on the walls of the cave. Some of them are ancient cave painting type designs carved into the stone walls, Native American petroglyphs, according to a faded informational sign that Ellie had stopped to read aloud to them. Some of the drawings are more modern graffiti, names carved in block letters and epithets to rival the ones on Ellie’s list.

“I think you’ll just have to spell those ones out, too,” Henry tells her, not wanting to get in the middle of this power struggle.

Later, after some whining about it not even being that late, the kids set up their sleeping bags close to the embers of the dying fire. It was the first fire Joel’s conceded to making since setting out a week ago, only agreeing to it because the walls of the cave will keep anyone from seeing the smoke, which all seems a bit overly cautious to Henry when they haven’t seen another soul since they left the Kansas City QZ.

The plummeting temperatures outside were definitely a factor in the decision. He lost track of the exact date a while ago, but they’ve got to be at least a week into October, and even though they’re just barely on the other side of the Nebraska border, it already feels colder than it was this time of year in Kansas City. Joel made up some excuse about it being alright to have a fire going because they’re a certain distance away from any populated areas, but Henry’s pretty sure that the real reason is that Ellie couldn’t stop shivering this morning. Joel seemed to think at first that she was running a fever, putting a hand to her forehead and asking over and over in a panicked voice if she felt okay.

“It’s just fucking cold out, Joel,” Ellie finally said, which seemed to assuage some of his fear, although his face had flooded with guilt, as if he controlled the weather.

Henry still hasn’t quite puzzled out what exactly the story is with the two of them. “I promised someone I’d look after her,” is the only follow-up explanation that he’s gotten from Joel. Despite the amount of time Ellie spends talking his ear off about astronauts and dinosaurs and comic book characters and video games she’s never played, leaving him to quickly translate for Sam, scrambling to recall or invent signs for words like antigravity and mutants, she’s been uncharacteristically quiet about what her life in Boston was like.

“Good night,” Ellie calls now from where she’s laying in her sleeping bag, reading one of her books. “Don’t talk about anything interesting while I’m asleep.”

“Do we ever talk about things that you think are interesting?” Henry asks.

She pauses for a moment, thinking, then shakes her head. “But don’t start now.”

Henry looks over at Sam, who’s snuggled up in his sleeping bag, curled up on his side with his back to Ellie’s. He’s holding the little Yoda toy that he found in the camper van last week in his fist, making it hop through the air and signing to himself, his brow furrowed with the dramatic story that he’s making up. Henry smiles, he hasn’t seen Sam play pretend like that in a while, and then he realizes with a pang of guilt that it’s because Sam had to leave behind the few toys that he had when they were on the run.

Joel, who’s supposed to be going to sleep, too, so he can take second watch, is once again poring over the map.

“We’re gonna want to try and be more strategic about where we’re stopping, we ain’t making it to Wyoming before the snow starts up,” he says when he catches Henry watching him.

Henry frowns, disliking the way that this is presented as a fact rather than a conversation, the same way Joel would talk to the fourteen-year-old.

“What do you mean by more strategic?” he asks.

Joel sighs. “It’s a whole lot of nothing out here, and— we still don’t wanna risk running into folks or infected, but we also can’t get stranded in the middle of the prairie with no shelter when the weather turns.”

“So, we should stick closer to the highway, where there’ll be more buildings to shelter in,” Henry says, raising his eyebrows, leaving the like I said implied.

Joel sighs again and shakes his head, muttering something about hitting the hay.

—

It’s getting on towards noon, based on where the sun is in the sky, and Ellie’s stomach has started to rumble. She hopes that Sam will say something about wanting to stop and eat the way he tends to do this time of day. He’s little, and Henry and Joel both don’t seem to mind if he whines about being tired or hungry or wanting to take a break. She’s pretty sure they’d probably be as understanding if she said the same things, but she’d rather just let the kid take the fall.

“Nebraska,” she says instead in a sing-song voice. “Did you ever go here before the outbreak?”

“What would I have been doing in Nebraska?” Joel asks.

Ellie shrugs. “I don’t know. All kinds of cool shit, like walk through fields, and walk through valleys, and walk past old farms—”

“Alright,” he cuts her off. “I think it is silent thinking time right now.”

She groans. “Dude, we just did that this morning.”

Joel established silent thinking time somewhere around day three of walking, after Ellie spent too long describing Mortal Kombat strategies. The rules are that once silent thinking time starts, you have to think silently, and then when time’s up, you’re allowed to share what you thought about with the group in five words or less.

Ellie makes a face at Sam, who shrugs in return, silent thinking time isn’t really something new for him, she supposes. She glances down and spots a red bottle cap on the ground, Coca Cola. She smiles and picks it up, tucking it into her pocket. Riley had a collection of old bottle caps that she kept in a shoebox along with her cassette tapes and her trading cards, the stuff she brought with her from home when she first came to the orphanage.

Riley would have thought this was all cool, traveling to different states, seeing new places, even if they were boring as fuck places like Nebraska. The two of them used to joke about the places they’d want to go on vacation. Los Angeles, New York City, London.

She’s lost track of how long it’s been since she last thought about Riley. Locked up in that room in the Firefly headquarters, Riley was all she could think about, unable to stop replaying that night over and over in her head. She had wondered then if she would ever be able to stop thinking about it, if maybe what she’d heard them whispering about her not turning wasn’t entirely right and if something actually was wrong with her, if her brain would just be stuck there in that fucking Halloween store forever.

She’s lost in thought until she’s suddenly back in Nebraska when her shoelace, untied again, nearly makes her topple over. She grumbles and stoops down to tie her shoe, double-knotting the laces again even though it doesn’t seem like it did much good the last time she double-knotted them just a couple of hours ago.

When she glances back up, Sam’s waiting for her, Henry and Joel paused a few paces ahead.

“What did everybody think about?” Ellie asks, even though Joel hasn’t called off silent thinking time yet. She signs the words as she says them, more clumsily than Henry does, but Sam seems to understand her anyways.

“Volcanoes,” he signs.

“Sick. How about you?” she asks Henry.

He shrugs. “Thinking about the route.”

She glances over at Joel, who shakes his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Just enjoyed the quiet.”

“What were you thinking about?” Sam asks her, and she feels a little glow of pride that she’s starting understand his signing without having to look to Henry for a translation.

“Halloween.” She spells out the word in sign language as she says it and then looks over at Henry. “How do you sign that?”

“I don’t know,” he laughs, “not really one that comes up often in conversation.”

Joel shakes his head again. “Why do you even know what Halloween is?”

“I know about lots of shit,” Ellie says. “I went to a Halloween store, in that old mall in Boston.”

He glances over and gives her a warning look, as if she’s going to follow that up with “and then I got bit.” She rolls her eyes, she’s not a fucking idiot. He’s the one who freaked out and thought she was turning when she was just shivering because it was fucking cold out the other morning.

They’re coming up on a long building of different storefronts, a strip mall, Joel had called it the last time they’d walked past one, which she initially thought meant something a lot more scandalous and funny than it actually did.

“Let’s stop here and look around a bit,” Joel says, gesturing to head towards the stores. “Food, ammo, winter gear.”

She follows Joel inside of one of the buildings, the sign above the door says CVS, which Joel explains was the name of a drug store, although that doesn’t really explain the majority of the shit that’s there, which is not drugs. She scours the shelves, but they’re pretty picked over and all she comes away with is a roll of duct tape, and a bright red keychain that says Home of the Cornhuskers on it. She hands the roll of tape to Joel and he nods once in something like appreciation.

“You like blue?” he asks, holding up a coat that looks like it’s about her size, maybe a little big.

“Yeah,” Ellie says, taking it from him. The inside of the coat is fuzzy, and the outside is smooth. She slips it on over her green jacket and grins. “Oh, this is one of those ones that’s, like, waterproof.”

Even with the new sweatshirt that she found, she hasn’t exactly been protected from the elements with a couple of hoodies and a threadbare cotton jacket. She hadn’t needed a winter coat back in Boston, they did all their drills inside and they didn’t even have the short recess periods at school anymore like they did when she was little. There was never anything to do outside then, the kids would all just run around on the cement out back behind the orphanage, but sometimes she’d find a cool rock or a weird bug. In any case, she’d never needed a thick coat like this until now.

It was almost hot outside when she and Joel left Boston, she’d gotten a sunburn their first day walking to Bill and Frank’s town, but over the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten really fucking cold out, especially at night.

“Thanks,” she says. “Did they sell coats and that kind of shit here, too?”

“No, must’ve been left behind by someone,” he says, which Ellie makes a face at, it’s kind of a grim thought, probably wasn’t under any great circumstances that a nice coat like this would get left behind. He gestures to her feet. “Need to find you some better shoes, too, those things ain’t made for walking long distances.”

“They’re fine,” she says. “But maybe some unfortunate fucker left their nice hiking boots behind somewhere around here, too.”

He shakes his head at her, but she can tell from his smirk that it’s the type of head shake that means that he secretly thinks what she said was funny. They meet Sam and Henry back outside of the storefronts. They came away from the grocery store next door with a few cans.

“Can we eat now?” Sam signs, and Henry elbows him.

“I could eat,” Ellie says, trying to sound noncommittal about it, even though her stomach is nearly aching with hunger by now.

She fastens her new keychain onto one of the zipper pulls of her backpack and glances over at Joel. He says something about not wanting to waste too much daylight with a shrug and a shake of his head, and she knows that head shake, too, which means that he’s going to be all grumpy about it, but he’s going to give in anyways.

—

After finishing his lunch, Sam opens up his bag and digs through it to make sure his things are all still there: his alien toy, his comics, his compass, his flashlight, his gun, his old books from home about Pompeii and knights, his new book about the fifty states. He skimmed through the fun facts about Nebraska page last night, but it turns out that there really weren’t very many fun things to know about Nebraska, even before the outbreak.

He takes his Pompeii book out to look at while Henry and Joel and Ellie look at the map and talk about the route for what feels like the five billionth time since they left. Sometimes, when he knows it’s something boring, he doesn’t really mind being left out of those kinds of conversations.

Pompeii is his favorite disaster to read about. The Titanic and the San Francisco Earthquake are interesting, but Pompeii is the craziest, the way that everything happened so fast and the whole city got decimated and everything got frozen exactly the way it was on that day thousands of years ago. His mom told him once that it reminded her of outbreak day, how everything changed all at once. She thought it was really sad and didn’t want to read it to him again, but she said he’s still allowed to read it on his own.

He’s reminded of Pompeii later as they walk through a store called Dollar Tree, birthday cards and candy bars still on the shelves, one of the cash registers left open. He goes to take a couple of coins from it, a coppery orange one and a small silver one.

Were these worth lots of money? he writes on his slate and holds it up to Joel, holding the coins out in the palm of his other hand.

Joel glances up from where he’s looking at the shelves in the, and shakes his head, pauses, then reaches to write something on the slate. You’d need 100 pennies to buy one thing here. He points to the copper coin.

“Wow,” Sam signs.

Joel nods. When they first met him, Sam thought Joel was kind of mean and grumpy, but now that he’s known him for a little while, he’s pretty sure he’s just grumpy.

There were coins in the ruins of Pompeii, too, he’s seen them in his book. If a volcano erupted right now here in Nebraska, maybe people would study these coins someday, too. Sam slips the penny and whatever the silver coin is called into his pocket.

—

About two weeks in, somewhere in eastern Nebraska, they happen upon a living history museum, the kind of place that Joel had spent hours wandering around in with Sarah back in Texas, like Pioneer Farms or Olde Town Texas. She went through a big history phase in elementary school, knew all kinds of shit from the books she’d check out from the library, adored the American Girl dolls he saved up for all year two Christmases in a row, Addy and Josefina. She even had a computer game about traveling on the Oregon Trail. She let him try to play it once and he almost immediately drowned her wagon party trying to ford a river.

“What the fuck is this place?” Ellie asks, her eyes round.

“A museum, sorta,” Joel says. “They’d set up the houses and the stores to look the way it would have back in frontier times.”

She runs her hand over one of the informational signs, wiping the dirt off. “Like Little House on the Prairie and that shit?”

He nods, a little taken aback, the way he always is, by the things from the pre-outbreak world that she knows about.

“Did you have a house like this?” she asks. “Back in frontier times.”

It takes a moment for him to catch the joke, and he gives her a long-suffering look when he does, which she raises her eyebrows at, holding back a smile.

“Nah,” he deadpans, “I lived in a cave like that one we stayed in the other day.”

She grins, her whole face lighting up at him playing along with her joke. He glances away, making sure that Sam and Henry are okay, which they are, Sam’s enamored with the steam engine on display and has spent the past ten minutes running around to look at it from every angle, Henry following him around with an amused look on his face.

Ellie starts asking a million more questions about the museum, if people really lived there, if the houses were really old or if they just built it to look like it was old.

Joel rubs the bridge of his nose, feeling another headache coming on. The small supply of painkillers that he’d had in his bag, back when this was supposed to be a one day excursion, have dwindled down to a few straggling pills in the pocket of his backpack, and he’s starting to realize how much he’d been dependent on them back in the QZ. He’s reminded of how his dad always was announcing his grand intentions of quitting drinking cold turkey, and how that never lasted very long. He’s starting to understand why.

More than he’d like to admit, even if it is mostly just these headaches making him feel bothered by it, he does feel like an asshole for being bothered by Ellie’s constant talking, she’s just a kid and she’s never even been outside the QZ before. Sarah had always asked lots of questions when she was excited, or nervous. His mind’s eye immediately goes back to her in the backseat of Tommy’s truck, asking about terrorists and whether you’d have to go into the city to get infected—

There’s a crack of thunder not too far in the distances and a few moments later, a bolt of lightning illuminates the gray sky. Sam registers it, maybe it’s something to do with the vibrations or maybe it was just the flash of light that alerted him, and Joel sees the worry in his eyes and the way he steps closer to his brother.

“Let’s get on inside before the rain comes,” Joel says, nodding towards one of the houses. He hoists his rifle up and gestures for Henry and Ellie to get their guns out, too. “We need to clear it. Stick close.”

It’s dark and clammy inside the house, which immediately has him on edge, but there’s no immediate sign of any danger, infected or otherwise. The house is set up with quaint, old-fashioned furniture and decor, all molding and in various states of disrepair, but no evidence of anyone having so much as touched the place in twenty years.

They step into the sitting room, which is drafty, but the house itself otherwise in good condition. From the craftsmanship of the house, he can tell that it is historic, not just built to look like it, must have been transported to the museum the way that they sometimes did with these places, and he makes a mental note to tell Ellie once they’ve finished clearing the place.

Suddenly, Ellie and Henry both freeze and whip their heads around to the doorway to the right, Ellie’s ponytail swinging behind her, Henry grabbing the hood of Sam’s jacket. Joel stops and turns his head, too.

Facing forward, he can hear it, too.

A distinct, eery, clicking sound.

Ellie grabs Sam’s hand and ducks behind Joel, clutching her pistol in her other hand. As Joel glances back, Sam points out to the hall, and sure enough, through the doorway they can all see a shadow staggering towards them in the hallway, blocking the path between them and their exit. Joel reaches into his bag to pull out a shiv, then tightens his grip on his rifle.

Henry reaches down and picks up a glass bottle, presumably to throw out into the hall to send it investigating in the other direction, but Joel holds up a hand, not wanting to do anything too hasty when that could backfire and just alert it to their presence. Henry frowns in response.

He scans the space and spots the source of the draft, an open window at the other end of the room. If they can stay in the shadows and move quietly enough across the room, they might be able to get the kids out safely that way, and then hopefully he and Henry can get rid of the infected swiftly and get the hell out of here.

He wishes he had Ellie’s ability to pick up sign language as quickly as she has been so he could silently communicate this to the others, but instead he just gives Henry a pointed look and gestures towards the kids and then to the window. He frowns, not thrilled with the plan, and Ellie narrows her eyes, clearly taking offense at being removed from the situation instead of getting to fight, but she gives him a curt nod in response anyways, taking Sam’s hand. She starts to slowly back up, and almost immediately steps on a squeaky floorboard.

The clicking immediately gets louder, almost frantic, and the unsteady footsteps quicken and grow closer.

It rounds the corner, staggering into the room, its grotesque sounds getting louder, and Henry shoots, aiming for the head, but misses by an inch, a chunk of its fungal plates falling to the ground instead, just making it madder.

Joel quickly glances back at the kids just in time to see, almost in slow-motion, Ellie’s goddamn untied shoelace slip under her foot and send her toppling to the ground, letting go of Sam’s hand before she pulls him down with her.

He can hear her whispering a constant stream of “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” to herself as she scrambles to get back to her feet, but as she tries to pulls herself up, she winces and hisses through her teeth.

He fires at the clicker, vaguely aware of Henry doing the same, and he hopes that there’s not others in the house because the noise absolutely will attract them.

Ellie grabs Sam’s hand again and practically drags him over to the window. She’s limping, she must have twisted her ankle when she fell. He pushes thought of another little girl with a hurt leg depending on him out of his mind before he can get caught in that spiral. She winces as she helps Sam to hoist himself up and out of the window, and she’s halfway out the window herself when the clicker whips around and lunges at her. She lets out a yelp, and even from across the room in the dim light of the old house, Joel can see its jagged teeth sinking through the fabric of her shoe.

Chapter Text

Sam falls out of the window and to the ground with a thud. He immediately spins around to peer up into the open window, and Ellie is right behind him, and then her eyes go big, and then she isn’t there.

He rushes closer to the window, but from the ground outside, he’s too short to see into the house, and he can’t see any of them. He glances behind himself, checking his six, like Joel calls it, but there’s nothing behind him, or in front of him, or anywhere.

He waits, knowing that he needs to stay out of sight, but he keeps waiting for what feels like ages and no one comes to the window. His stomach starts to ache.

Maybe the monster got all of them.

He digs through his bag, shuffling through his books and his alien toy, and he finds his gun. He isn’t allowed to touch it except for in emergencies, but this feels like an emergency.

Just then, Henry pops back up in the window, quickly scanning Sam up and down, his brow furrowed. Usually Henry’s emotions are pretty easy for him to read, they’ve spent so much time together that it’s almost like they can read each other’s minds like Agent Cerveau in Savage Starlight, but right now feels like there’s too many all mixed up on Henry’s face for Sam to understand— fear, relief, dread, worry.

“Is Ellie okay?” Sam asks, his hands barely able to keep up with the questions running through his mind. “Did it get her? Did you kill it?”

“Stay right there, don’t move,” Henry signs back, ignoring his questions, and disappears from view again.

Sam frowns, sitting down on the ground outside of the house and pulling his knees up to his chest. He feels a droplet of rain fall onto his head, and then another, but he doesn’t bother to pull up his hood. Still holding his gun in one hand, he goes back into his bag and pulls out his alien. Yoda, Ellie had told him was its name the other day, a character from a movie that she’d never seen, but she saw a book about it once. Sam clutches the toy in his fist and holds it tight to his chest.

—

The clicker is dead on the ground, a shiv in its neck. An antique oil lamp lays broken on the ground and an ornate wooden chair is knocked over, but the room otherwise is intact, barely any sign of the catastrophe that just took place.

Henry looks over to Ellie, who’s sitting on the floor, her back pressed up against the wall, breathing hard, rubbing her foot with one hand, her face scrunched up. With the immediate threat of the clicker gone, he starts to let the preemptive grief wash over him.

The bite is down on her foot, they have some time until she turns, which in some ways makes it even harder, having to figure out when it’s time. But when the time comes, he’s going to have to be the one, he realizes, to have to put a bullet through her head.

Joel may not be her dad, but over the past two weeks, Henry’s seen how he reacts to any potential threat, terrified of anything happening to her. He knows that if he were in Joel’s shoes, if it were Sam who got bit—

He can’t make Joel go through that.

He glances over at Joel, assuming that he’ll step in, but Joel’s clutching his chest, staring blankly ahead, clearly in shock. So Henry steps in instead, squatting down next to her and putting a hand on her little shoulder, and she sniffles.

“Ellie,” he says, not sure what to follow that up with. What do you say to a fourteen-year-old kid who’s got maybe a day ahead of her, if she’s lucky?

She stares up at him, seeming to suddenly realize that he’s in the room, and her eyes widen and she shakes her head as she pulls away from him, pressing herself closer to the wall.

“No, no, I’m— it’s okay.” She tugs at her coat sleeve, holding up her bare forearm, glancing briefly up at Joel before looking back at Henry. “I’m immune.”

There’s another bite on her arm. Henry blinks, confused, he knows he didn’t see it get her arm, and he’s even more confused when he looks closer and sees that the bite marks aren’t bleeding or even scabbed, but healed over. Her words catch up to him, ringing in his ears. Immune.

Joel seems to suddenly snap back from wherever he was and he steps in front of her, placing himself between the two of them, one hand raised and one on the pistol in the holster on his hip, although Henry hasn’t even reached for his gun, instead looking on with devastation that’s quickly turning into bewilderment.

“She ain’t been out of your sight for two weeks,” Joel says anyways. “She got bit before we left Boston.”

“Twice,” Ellie corrects him.

“Once since I was responsible for you.”

“Twice now,” she mumbles.

Joel looks back to where she’s sitting on the floor and shoots her a sharp look, then turns back to Henry. “It’s been a month since she first got bit. That’s why we’re headed to Wyoming. There’s doctors out west—”

“Working on a cure?” Henry asks, skeptical.

“Yeah,” Joel says with a shrug. “I don’t know the specifics, my job’s just to get her out there.”

Henry shakes his head. “What the fuck?”

A sudden movement in the window cuts him off, but it’s just Sam’s little hand, trying to lift himself up to peek back into the house.

“Jesus Christ,” Henry mumbles, and goes to help hoist him back through the window into the house.

It’s started to rain outside, and Sam’s jacket is nearly soaked through. When Henry gets a closer look at him, he sees that his eyes are puffy and his nose is running. He’s been crying, which he almost never does, not when he was a baby, not when he was sick. Henry reaches to pull him into a hug, but Sam pulls away, glancing worriedly around the room. He immediately clocks the clicker on the ground, his eyes widening. He searches the room for Ellie, and his face falls when he spots her. Before Henry can stop him, Sam rushes over to her, throwing his arms around her neck and squeezing his eyes shut tight.

“I’m okay, it’s alright,” she says. “Buddy, hey.”

She tries to pull away, but he keeps clinging to her.

“Tell him I’m not sick,” she says, looking over at Henry, her voice hoarse. “I’m not— I’m not going to get sick. Tell him.”

Henry sits down on the floor next to them and gently shakes Sam’s shoulder. Sam looks over at him, fresh tears streaking down his face.

“She says that she got bit before and she didn’t get sick,” Henry signs, phrasing it carefully, not wanting to raise Sam’s hopes too much.

Sam raises an eyebrow, giving him a puzzled, skeptical look, and Ellie pulls her sleeve up again, showing Sam the bite marks, and he gives her a wide-eyed look before gawking at the healed bite marks again.

“Here, can I see your foot?” Joel says, kneeling down next to her with a grunt. Sam moves away to give him space, leaning into Henry.

Ellie winces as she slips her sneaker off. Henry can see blood starting to ooze through her sock. Joel reaches a hand out to help her with the sock and she instantly pulls away, looking back at him with alarm.

“I don’t— I don’t know how it spreads,” she says, frowning. “Before, in Boston, they said nobody was supposed to touch me. I can do it.”

She peels the sock off and sure enough, there’s a distinct arc of teethmarks on the bridge of her foot, blistering with dark lines of mycellium branching out from the bite. Instinctively, Henry moves back.

The canvas protected her foot from the damage he knows a clicker could have done, but it still doesn’t look good, already bruising and swollen. Her ankle seems swollen, too. Joel seems to notice the same thing, and goes to check it for a break.

“I won’t touch anywhere near the bite, you’re okay,” he says before Ellie can protest. He gingerly feels around her ankle and shakes his head. “It don’t feel broken, I think you just twisted it.”

Henry feels a sudden rush of anger, that Ellie’s only hurt, and infected, maybe, because of Joel’s dicey as fuck plan. None of this might have happened if Joel had let him go ahead and distract the clicker.

There’s part of him that wants to take Sam and go right now, before this shit show devolves any more. He isn’t sure what to believe, the marks on her arm really do look like a healed bite, but the chances of the one immune person in the world being this one little girl seem pretty fucking unlikely.

This house is clear, though, the commotion earlier would have attracted any other infected, and he doesn’t want to risk taking shelter somewhere else and being greeted by more infected, especially if it’s just him and Sam. He frowns, wrapping his arm tighter around Sam.

—

The first coherent thought that comes to Joel’s mind once the panic settles a bit is R.I.C.E., which he doesn’t realize he’s said aloud until he sees the strange look Henry and Ellie are giving him.

“Rice?” Henry repeats, narrowing his eyes, clearly wondering if Joel’s having a stroke or something.

Joel shakes his head. “No, it’s a— what do you call it when each letter stands for something?”

“Acronym,” Ellie responds immediately.

He nods. “Yeah. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. Wish we had a way to ice your foot, but we can do the other three.”

He takes a strip of fabric from his pack and hands it to Ellie to wrap around the bite, along with a dampened piece of fabric to clean it off with, then he gets another strip to wrap around her foot and ankle in a figure-eight pattern to attempt to keep the swelling down. He starts explaining to her why wrapping it will help, bullshitting most of the explanation, keeping his mind from wandering off to the times he’s done this before, wandering to that rooftop in Boston, or to the sidelines of a middle school soccer game in the blistering Texas heat.

The day passes slower than any of the days they’ve had on the road. They sit in silence for a while. He stays seated on the ground, not wanting to make a show of how difficult it’s going to be for him to get back up off the ground. Ellie and Sam sit on the sofa, her foot propped up on a throw pillow, flipping through the pages of his Pompeii book, Ellie absently nodding when Sam points out different illustrations and animatedly signs explanations. Henry sits in the stiff armchair next to them, tense and clearly on edge after everything that went down, which Joel can’t fault him for. The rain patters on the roof, but the house is sturdily built and stays dry inside.

“It’s a real old house,” he says, remembering Ellie’s question earlier. “Not built to look old.”

She nods once, raising her eyebrows disinterestedly, her eyes distant.

“You alright?” Joel asks.

She shrugs, pursing her lips. “This just fucking sucks, there’s so much cool shit to see here and I just have to fucking sit here all day.”

He can tell that there’s more to it than that, but he doesn’t push the topic. He also decides against telling her that it’s definitely going to be more than just one day of sitting around.

Through the window, he watches the sun dips lower, illuminating the clouds and turning the sky brilliant shades of orange that would be beautiful if it didn’t indicate the nightfall and the concerns that come with that. Joel recognizes the worry in Henry’s frown, the same fear that he and Tess had that first night, his heart pounding in his ears every time Ellie stirred in her sleep, terrified of accidentally falling asleep himself and waking up too late.

Ellie sees it, too.

“I can stay in isolation tonight, if you want.” She gestures towards the nearby closet with her head. There’s none of the snark behind her words that he’d expect. Her word choice is jarring, in isolation doesn’t sound like a term she’d come up with on her own. He’s reminded of Tess’s conversation with her about Marlene, “She locked me up and had her guys test me every day,” which he hadn’t thought much of in the moment, but now, the thought of Ellie, who can’t go more than five minutes without having the compulsive need to ask a question or crack a joke, constantly glancing up at him to make sure he’s listening, being locked up alone somewhere for three weeks— he shakes off that visual.

“We’re not gonna lock you in a closet, Ellie,” Henry says gently.

She frowns, worried. “I don’t mind, I don’t wanna— if, this time, it— if I—”

“You’ll be fine,” Joel cuts her off. “There’s a door on the kitchen, you head on over there, I’ll be right in. Are you gonna be able to walk?”

It’s a stupid question to ask this kid, because of course she’s going to take it as a challenge. She nods, her chin jutted out, and to prove a point, she gets up and starts to limp across the hall.

“I understand,” Joel says quietly,  looking over at Henry, once she’s out of earshot, “if you don’t want to travel with us, if you would rather not risk it. But if that’s the case, then you just need to take him and go.”

“I don’t know what to think about any of this shit,” he says in a low voice, an edge to his tone that Joel wasn’t expecting, turning so that Sam can’t read his lips from where he’s sitting on the sofa, “but even if all of this is true, I’m pretty fucking sure that Sam isn’t immune. What if it had bit him instead of Ellie? If you’d let me distract it—”

“You don’t know that would’ve worked,” Joel cuts him off.

“And your plan did?” Henry snaps. “All I’m saying is that you’ve got to trust me, because— with all of this shit? I’m putting a fuck ton of trust in you, man. You stay with Ellie, come get me if she— if you need me. I’ll keep watch tonight.”

He reaches out a hand to help Joel up from the floor, which Joel reluctantly takes, stifling the old man grunts that he apparently makes now.

Sam is back at Henry’s side, asking questions, his hands moving so quick that Joel doesn’t have any hope even attempting to keep up with what he might be saying, but he recognizes him spelling out Ellie’s name along with a sign that he recognizes from when the kids were talking about their comic books.

Superpower.

There’s another bolt of lightning and a crash of thunder that shakes the house and Sam startles again, leaning in closer to his brother. Joel’s mind is flooded with the memory of the patter of Sarah’s little feet down the hallway every time there was a summer storm when she was small, her running in with a stack of books, Corduroy and The Very Hungry Caterpillar and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and snuggling up next to him with one ear pressed to his chest and the other covered by her hand because it would “make the noise not so big.”

He heads off to the other room to find Ellie.

She’s sitting on the floor of the kitchen, the sleeve of her sweatshirt pushed up, staring at her forearm. True to her word, she hasn’t let anyone, Joel included, see her bite marks since they left Bill’s house. The scabs from her bite at the museum have fallen off, replaced by new, pink skin.

“If they leave, do you think they’ll say goodbye?” she asks, picking at a hole in the knee of her jeans.

“I reckon so,” he says, closing the door behind him. “It didn’t sound like that was Henry’s plan, though. ‘Safety in numbers,’ right?”

She frowns, unconvinced. “Yeah, but—”

“Ain’t worth worrying about right now, Ellie.”

She curls in on herself a little tighter, nodding, more to herself than to him. After a moment, she unfurls her sleeping bag, climbing in and curling up on her side.

He takes his backpack and places it under her foot to elevate it, letting her keep her own backpack to use as a pillow. He’s sure there’s more pillows around the house somewhere, but he’s too exhausted to go looking for them, and he can’t bring himself to leave her locked up alone in here, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

“Joel?” Ellie whispers, wrapping the sleeping bag tighter around herself.

“Hmm?” he hums, sitting down in a kitchen chair that he hopefully should be able to get back out of with a little more dignity than he had getting up from the floor.

She’s quiet for a moment, and he wonders if he misheard, when she speaks again, her voice so quiet that he can barely hear it.

“What if I turn this time?”

He looks over at her, shaking his head reflexively as she stares back at him with those big, trusting brown eyes that terrify the shit out of him. “You won’t. Do you— do you feel different, or—?”

She shakes her head, sniffling. “No, but— I—”

“Here,” he says, “can I see?”

She sits back up, wriggling out of the sleeping bag and sitting on top of it, and she carefully unwraps the makeshift bandage on her foot. He tries not to think too much at all about the way she keeps her eyes fixed on him, waiting for his reaction. He leans down in his chair and sighs a breath of relief.

“Look, kiddo,” he says, surprising both of them with the softness in his voice, “it’s the same, hasn’t spread at all.”

She takes a shaky breath and nods, looking for herself. He gets a clean strip of cloth out of his bag and lets her put it on the bite, then he kneels down again to wrap a bandage back around her ankle, remembering that it should be a little looser overnight, working off a vague decades-old memory of the directions on the Ace bandage packaging.

“Can I stay awake with you?” she asks.

“I think you need some sleep, it’s been a long day,” he says.

She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Well,” Joel says, not about to start arguing with this kid about bedtime, “you lie down and rest your head then, at least. The more you rest, the faster you’ll heal up.”

She lays back down, propping the backpack underneath her foot again, and, since he’s already down here anyway, he sighs and turns to sit down on the floor next to her, his back against the cabinets.

“I’m gonna slow us down,” she says after a moment.

Joel shakes his head. “We ain’t going nowhere without you.”

“Right,” she mumbles, so quiet he can barely hear her. “Cargo.”

It’s been barely over two weeks since he made that comment in Bill’s truck, and he knows it’s not the whole truth— he knew it back then, if he’s being honest with himself.

“I’m not gonna abandon a defenseless, injured kid,” he says. A better man would apologize outright for saying something shitty like that to a kid, but Ellie doesn’t seem to be bothered by his lack of a real apology.

Instead, she raises her eyebrows, propping herself up on one elbow. “I’m not defenseless.”

“Oh,” he says, “I’m aware, you made quite a first impression.”

She rolls her eyes and sighs, one corner of her mouth twitching up. “Dude, you need to let that go—”

“Need to let you running at me with a knife go?”

This gets a half-hearted giggle out of her and she settles back down, and when he glances over again, her eyes are closed, a stray strand of hair fallen in front of her face.

She’s quiet, and it allows his mind to wander. She was limping pretty bad just on her way walking across the hall. It’ll be days, if not weeks, before she’s healed up enough to walk at the pace they were going at before, and it’s not like they were making great distances before. It’ll get cold out here fast, the snow will come, and he can’t stop his mind from jumping to all the horrible fates waiting for them between here and Wyoming— frozen to death in the snow, losing frostbitten extremities, starving to death because there’s no food to be found in the middle of fucking nowhere.

He glances down at Ellie, who’s asleep already, curled up on her side a few inches away from him. He’s reminded with a pang of his last night with Sarah, her falling asleep on the sofa in front of the TV.

There’s part of him that feels like he should keep Ellie awake. When Sarah was five and bumped her head at a peewee soccer game and got a minor concussion, the nurse in the ER had told him that it was a myth that you had to keep someone awake after they hit their head, but he still found himself checking on her on the hour throughout the night, holding a hand by her nose to make sure she hadn’t stopped breathing—

He stops that train of thought before he can dwell on the fact that he knows, now, what it was like to feel her stop breathing.

He’s unnerved by the way that those memories that he’s kept locked away for so long keep finding their way out more and more frequently lately. Not just those hellish last moments, but every soft little detail of that other lifetime that was locked away, too— soccer games and thunderstorms and doctor’s visits.

Ellie takes a snuffly little breath that should reassure him, she’s still here, still breathing, but instead it just fills him with more thoughts of ways that he’ll fail her, too.

—

Joel’s gone, when Ellie wakes up. She glances around the empty kitchen and her brain immediately starts to short circuit with panic. They left her here alone, maybe she’s starting to turn and she didn’t realize it, maybe she’s not and she’s just going to die out here—

She’s back in the Halloween store again. Riley, or at least what used to be Riley, is next to her, a puddle of dark blood pooling out from under her head. Ellie’s been sitting there for days or maybe hours or maybe weeks, she can’t remember. All the rubber masks, which she and Riley had laughed about earlier, stare holes into her, knowing what she did, they saw her pull the trigger, and she still isn’t turning, and there’s loud voices, or maybe just one voice, and someone, something is nudging her.

“Ellie?” the voice calls out.

She wonders how they know her name—

“Ellie, you’re blocking the door, can you move?”

Joel.

She takes a shaky breath and opens her eyes, realizing that she’s sitting up against the kitchen door, blocking him from coming in as he’s trying to open it. She hops up, wincing when she puts weight on her bad foot, and opens the door.

Joel’s gives her a look that’s nearly as panicked as she felt a moment ago.

“You alright?” he asks, sounding almost out of breath.

She nods, limping over to sit down in a kitchen chair. Joel sits down across from her.

“Where the fuck were you?” Ellie asks, unable to hide the way her voice shakes as she asks it.

His eyes go all soft for a moment, which doesn’t make her feel any better, she doesn’t want to be pitied, she’s fucking pissed at him.

“I just went to check and make sure everything was alright with Henry and Sam,” he says. “You were out cold, I didn’t think you’d be up for a while yet. Are you— alright?”

She wipes at her eyes quickly with the hem of her sleeve. “I’m fucking fine.”

“Ellie,” he starts, but he’s interrupted by footsteps outside the door.

“Is she okay?” Henry’s voice calls.

“I’m fine,” she calls back before Joel can reply.

“Can we come in?” Henry asks. “Sam’s here, too, he wants to see you.”

She turns to Joel, who nods and goes to open the door. When he opens it, Henry’s holding an arm out to keep Sam from rushing in, and she recognizes the apprehensive look on his face, she’s seen the same look from Joel and Tess, and from the Fireflies who came in to test her.

Trying to put him at ease, Ellie holds out her arm, holding it steady, and starts counting, but pauses at four when she sees the confused look on Henry’s face.

“What are you doing?” he asks, almost sounding a little amused.

She frowns. “Showing you I’m not infected.”

“Yeah, I— could tell,” he gestures vaguely towards her, emphasizing the fact that she hasn’t turned into a fucking monster.

She shrugs, sitting back down. “That’s what the Fireflies had me do.”

Sam pushes past his older brother and sits down in the chair next to her, pulling it close so that he’s right next to her, and she can tell that it makes Henry nervous, it makes her nervous, but she also doesn’t want to pull away.

“The Fireflies?” Henry asks.

“They’re the ones who have the doctors out west.” She pauses, thinking of how to explain what they are, hearing Riley’s voice in her mind, freedom fighters, terrorists. “They’re, like— I don’t know if they were in Kansas City—”

“They were, for a while. FEDRA shut them down pretty quick.” He frowns. “How did you end up with them?”

Ellie shrugs. “They found me after I got bit, the first time.”

“What do you mean, they found you?” Henry asks.

She pauses, she knows Joel’s rule is that they keep their histories to themselves, but that’s not Henry’s rule.

“I was in the mall, where I got bit,” she says, and the words starting to tumble out of her like she’s been waiting to say something, anything, about what happened, even if she’s still leaving the most important part, the most important person, out of the story, “and I was waiting to turn, and they found me there, they had, like, a hideout there or something, and took me back to their headquarters or whatever the fuck, and they locked me up there for a while and then when I didn’t turn, they decided to send me to their doctors so they can figure out what happened to me and use that to make a cure and shit.”

Sam glances over at Henry, and he quickly translates the story. Ellie glances over at Joel, who’s frowning, and she’s not sure if he’s mad or just worried. Henry’s quiet for a moment afterwards, clearly mulling something over in his mind.

“Does your family know where you are?” he asks.

Ellie stays quiet for a moment, just to fuck with him, which she feels mean for doing when she sees the heartbroken look on his face. She quickly shakes her head. “I’m an orphan. Were you worried you were, like, kidnapping me?”

Henry rolls his eyes. “For a second there, yeah.” He’s quiet again. “I mean— do you want to go to these doctors?”

“Yeah,” she says immediately, not realizing until she says it that no one’s asked her that before. “I kind of have to, I’m gonna save the fucking world or whatever.”

“How’s your foot feeling?” Henry asks, clearly wanting to change the subject. “I mean, aside from the bite and shit, it looked like you twisted your ankle pretty good yesterday.”

Ellie winces, suddenly aware of how much her ankle fucking hurts now that attention has been drawn to it.

She shrugs. “Wrapping it helped, I think.”

“Good,” Joel says. “Still wish we could figure out some way to ice it.”

Ellie shrugs. “Maybe it’ll snow soon.”

He clucks his tongue, shaking his head. “Not hoping for that.”

—

The first couple of days that they’re stuck at the house, Sam wakes up scared that maybe it happened, maybe this is the day that Ellie turns, but every morning, she’s still herself.

“We have to be careful,” Henry keeps telling him. “People always turn after they get bitten.”

But they’ve both seen the bite, and it’s not getting worse the way that the posters in the QZ described it. It’s getting better, scabbing over the same way Sam’s elbow did when he fell down and scraped it last week.

Ellie has to sit around a lot so her foot can heal, which makes her act a lot grumpier towards everyone than she was when they were traveling. Sam’s allowed to walk around the house, although he stays out of the room where the dead clicker is. It’s too creepy in there. He feels kind of bad about getting to wander around since he knows Ellie’s jealous about it, so he brings interesting things that he finds over to her, old-fashioned books and something called a gravy boat and a kind of scary-looking porcelain doll that Ellie names Veronica, which she’s been having Sam set up in different places around the house when Joel’s not looking to creep him out.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table, frowning as she draws in her journal, when he brings over an old fashioned pen. Joel’s sitting across from her at the table, looking at the map again, rubbing the bridge of his nose and shaking his head the way he does when he looks at it, and Henry’s out scavenging in the other parts of the museum for supplies.

Sam sets the pen down at the table and Ellie smiles, turning it over in her hand. She tries to write with it, but no ink comes out. She turns the page in her journal and hands him one of her pencils so they can draw together. After thinking for a moment, she starts drawing a dinosaur and he adds a volcano.

“I wish I could see a real volcano,” she says. She signs a lot more quickly than she did when she first started learning.

Sam nods in agreement. “It would be scary, though, if you got too close.”

Ellie shrugs, and he’s not quite sure if she disagrees or if she just didn’t understand the signs.

In the corner of the page in her journal, he writes, Are you ever scared?

She reads and gives him a funny look. Do I not look scared?

He can’t think of a time when she has, not back in Kansas City when they were running from snipers and hordes of infected, or even when she got bit. Nervous, or surprised, or worried, maybe, but never scared.

Never, he writes.

Ellie raises her eyebrows.

I’m scared all the time, she writes, then scrunches up her nose and adds, of scorpions!

She grins and he makes a face at her, and she shrugs apologetically. She frowns for a moment, then writes, I’m scared of ending up alone.

She looks over to him, waiting for his response, but his thoughts are interrupted by the vibration of a knock on the table. He and Ellie both look up to see Joel gesturing towards the doll sticking out of his backpack, raising an eyebrow. Ellie giggles, reaching over to give Sam a high-five. He grins, the backpack was his idea, he’s been waiting for hours for Joel to open it.

Henry comes back into the kitchen then, frowning and not holding any supplies. He shakes his head at something that Ellie asks, and does the really aggravating thing he’s been doing more and more lately, where he turns his head so that Sam can’t read his lips. Sam can see the way that Joel’s nodding, concerned.

Sam bangs his fist on the table, scowling at Henry when he turns around.

“We’ll find some more food soon, we still have plenty of supplies,” Henry says to him, which Sam is pretty sure is a lie and is definitely not what he was saying to Joel.

Sam glances back over at Ellie, who’s put her head down on the table, folding her arms in front of her. He reaches down to rummage through his bag and digs out Yoda, only to find that the green sword he’s holding got broken. He holds it up to show Henry, who just glances over and nods, too busy telling everybody else secrets to care. Sam wrinkles his nose and stomps out of the room, holding the toy tighter in his hand.

Chapter Text

It takes about a week for Joel to feel comfortable getting back on the road again after Ellie’s injury, and it takes Henry just about as long to feel reasonably reassured that Ellie won’t turn. Every evening, Henry goes to sleep convinced that this will be the day it’s going to happen, placing himself between Sam and the doorway of the room where they’re sleeping, just in case, but every morning, she’s still the same. The bite on her right foot continues to heal up, no sign of it spreading at all.

Joel isn’t quick to get a move on the morning that they finally set out again. Henry watches as Joel repacks his bag and double-checks each room, obviously hesitant to get back on the road because he’s worried about Ellie walking long distances again on her hurt foot. He most likely would have pushed for them to stay put for longer if it weren’t for the fact that it’s gotten more and more difficult to find food. The snowflakes that have started occasionally swirling around outside serve as a reminder of the conditions that await them if they wait any longer, too.

Despite Joel’s best efforts, it doesn’t take long for them to pack up. They’ve already gone through most of the supplies they’ve been able to find around the museum, there’s not much left to scavenge.

As they’re heading out, Ellie makes a show of waving goodbye to the clicker corpse in the living room as they leave the house, thanking it for its hospitality, which Sam giggles at, although Henry clocks the way he nervously avoids actually looking at the clicker.

“You’re a weird kid,” Joel mutters.

“You’re a weird kid,” Ellie says with a grin, taking a look back at the house and shaking her head. “This place was the worst. I wish I’d gotten bit at, like, a fuckin’ dinosaur museum or something.”

“I don’t,” Henry says. “We would have been spending the whole time trying to keep you from running around and looking at the dinosaurs and hurting your foot more.”

Ellie laughs, nodding in agreement, but Joel’s expression clouds with worry at the mention of her foot.

“Now, the minute your foot starts to bother you on the road,” he says to Ellie, “you say something. You keep walking on it too long when it’s hurting, it’s just gonna get worse, and then we ain’t getting nowhere. Alright?”

Ellie nods.

“Repeat it,” Joel says, stern.

She rolls her eyes and sighs. “Tell you when my foot hurts.”

Her ankle is wrapped and her sneaker is duct taped back together where it was damaged by the clicker, which isn’t a permanent solution, but it’s the only one they’ve got until they happen to come across a usable, comfortable pair of shoes in her size. She’s not limping, but the combination of the still-healing bite and twisted ankle has her moving slower than she was before. Still, they’re able to put some distance between themselves and the living history museum that day, and they make better time the next day.

The days and weeks start to blend together, all nearly interchangeable long days of walking through long stretches of overgrown farmland and crumbling roads, rambling monologues from Ellie, interspersed with periods of silent thinking time imposed by Joel.

The leaves fall from the trees and the air gets colder, and as they continue to head west, the towns get smaller, with more distance from one to the next. More and more, they have to depend on game meat for food, with no canned foods to be found. Sam wrinkles his nose at it the first few times, and Henry’s pretty sure they all feel the same way about squirrel and rabbit and whatever other gamey vermin they’re able to find, but after a while, they’re all hungry from walking, and food is food.

Each evening, they set up camp in whatever spot seems safe enough to camp out in for the night. Most evenings entail practicing sign language. Ellie’s gotten really quick with it, able to carry on full conversations at this point and signing as she speaks so that Sam can be part of the conversation. Joel’s taken longer to pick it up, but he’s trying, insisting that it’s important as a survival skill, although he still pays attention when the kids go off on their tangents about obscure words from Savage Starlight.

Joel and Henry trade off keeping watch at night, which is very rarely eventful. They’re too far from any populated areas at this point for there to be many real threats, infected or not, although at Joel’s insistence, they rarely start a campfire as long as the weather permits. Ellie continues to insist that she can help keep watch, which Joel continues to shut down.

Each morning, they roll up their sleeping bags with bleary eyes and eat breakfast and clean up their campsite and head off on their way.

On one particularly cold morning in what Henry figures must be mid-November, somewhere deep up in Nebraska, he watches as the pink early morning light shines in through the broken window of the tire shop they’ve camped out in for the night, the sunlight glinting off a pile of hubcaps. If he listens hard enough, he can hear birds chirping.

The quietness out here still feels surreal. It was never quiet in the QZ. Even after the strictly enforced curfew in Kansas City, the night was always punctuated with gunshots and yells and sharp orders and FEDRA announcements over the megaphones and speakers.

When Sam was a baby and their mom first figured out that he was deaf, Henry used to wonder what it was like to not hear anything. Even though in some ways it was a relief to know that Sam wouldn’t be kept awake and frightened by sounds outside the same way the rest of them were, it still seemed terrifying to Henry at the time, not having that sense to rely on, and a little sad, too, to never hear music or laughter or anything else nice. But out here, where there’s so little to hear in the first place, there’s part of him that wonders if it’s at least a little peaceful to not hear anything at all.

More snow has started to fall, and by the time they set out for the day, the ground is nearly covered. Snowflakes stick to Sam’s hair, which is dry and messy. Henry’s tried his best to keep it looking halfway decent, but hair supplies were few and far between to be found even back in the QZ. Unsurprisingly, they haven’t happened upon anything out here in Nebraska. Henry flips the hood of Sam’s coat up over his head, and Sam scrunches up his nose and pulls the hood back down.

“God fucking damnit,” Ellie mutters from behind them.

Henry glances back at her. She’s tripped into a snowbank that goes up to her calf, and as she steps out, her sneaker on her right foot is full of snow.

“Dust it off quick,” Joel says. “Is your sock wet?”

Ellie shakes her head, sitting down on a small patch of mostly dry ground and taking off her shoe to dump the snow out of it, wiping out the inside of the shoe with the sleeve of her coat and dusting the snow off of her foot.

Afterwards, she doesn’t say anything about her foot hurting, but the cold does seem to bother her ankle, and after a couple more hours of walking, it’s clear from the way that she’s practically wincing with each step that it’s hurting her. Joel notices it, too.

“We’ll stop here and rest,” he says as they approach a gas station.

“It’s not even dark yet,” Ellie says. She stops and frowns at Joel. “I can tell you when I need to take a break, I’m not a fucking baby.”

He sighs and continues to walk. “No one said you were.”

She scowls, crossing her arms across her chest. “Well, you’re treating me like one. I can take care of myself. I can help keep watch, I’m a good shot, I already learned everything in school—”

“Oh, they already taught you everything in FEDRA school?” He turns back to look at her. “I ain’t trying to mollycoddle you, but I told you before, you’re just gonna hurt yourself more if you push yourself.”

If Ellie were in a better mood, she’d have a field day with his use of the word mollycoddle, but she’s too fired up to even acknowledge it. Sam tugs on the sleeve of Henry’s coat.

“What are they talking about?” he signs.

Henry shakes his head. “Just bickering. Ellie doesn’t want to stop walking.”

“I know you’re talking about me,” Ellie snaps, shooting a sharp look at Henry.

“I’m not talking about you,” he says, “Sam was just asking—”

She cuts him off. “I know what he was asking.”

Henry raises both his hands in surrender, which doesn’t seem to placate Ellie at all. She scowls at him and over at Joel.

“We probably won’t even find the fuckin’ Fireflies, you should just leave me and go.” There’s a challenging gleam in her eye and edge to her voice, and the tiniest hint of a question in her tone, too.

“Do you actually think we’d leave you behind?” Henry asks.

Ellie frowns and shrugs. “I’m slowing us down.”

Henry shakes his head. “We’ll be alright. We’re a team, we’re sticking together. How does your foot feel?”

“It’s fine,” she says, which is clearly a lie just from the way that she’s standing, leaning to one side to put her weight on her good foot. “I can keep walking.”

Henry hesitates, not sure what to say next. Handling any kind of conflict with Ellie is vastly different from dealing with Sam, where it’s easy to know the right thing to do or say to win him over, partly because he knows him so well and partly because it turns out that Sam’s just a naturally easygoing kid. With Ellie, it sometimes feels a little like when he tried to befriend the stray cats in the back alley in the QZ as a kid. He nearly breathes a sigh of relief when he spots Joel walking back over to them from where he’d walked ahead up the road.

“How about this?” Joel says to Ellie. “We rest up for a bit, then we’ll reassess and we can walk a little further tonight if we all feel up to it. Not a big deal to lose a couple hours, we ain’t getting too far in this snow, anyways.”

Ellie nods sullenly, turning to head towards the gas station and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. As Henry expected, after a couple of hours of being forced to rest, which mostly consists of alternating between glaring at Joel and disinterestedly flipping through her comic books, she insists on pushing ahead for a little while longer, and true to his word, Joel lets her. Back on the road, she forges ahead of the rest of them, as if making it to Wyoming depends on them making it however far she’s decided in her mind that they need to get today. Sam rushes to keep up with her.

“She is a force to be reckoned with,” Henry says under his breath.

Joel nods in agreement.

—

Sam’s Fifty States facts book says that Nebraska is home to fossil beds and the world’s largest wooly mammoth skeleton and a Stonehenge that’s made out of cars, but he hasn’t seen any evidence of that. They apparently chose the most boring part of Nebraska to walk through.

They stop by some boring stores somewhere in the boring part of Nebraska one afternoon to look for supplies and get out of the cold. Ellie points out the sign for a store named Dick’s Sporting Goods and doubles over in a fit of giggles over the name, which Henry and Joel both roll their eyes at. No one will explain to Sam why it’s so funny.

Henry goes to check out the drug store, and Sam and Ellie follow Joel into the sporting goods store. There’s big, faded pictures on the walls of people playing basketball and climbing mountains and running, all the stuff people used to do for fun before the outbreak.

“Look for shoes,” Joel signs after he’s cleared the building. He’s saying something more aloud, but he’s still not very good at signing, and Sam glances over to Ellie.

“Boots, gloves, camping things,” she translates.

Sam nods, and he and Ellie set off to go look. They wander around the aisles but don’t find a lot: a pair of neon yellow sandals, a set of weights, a mostly deflated basketball. Ellie narrows her eyes, eyeing a door at the back of the building.

“Come on,” she says, gesturing for Sam to follow her. She turns and walks backwards so she can sign and walk at the same time. “Back in Boston, my friend and I snuck into a 7-Eleven, and at first it didn’t look like there was anything left there, but she said that stores usually had back rooms where they kept all the extra shit.”

While Ellie picks the lock of the door with her knife, Sam glances back at Joel, whose back is turned to them, examining some camping supplies on the other side of the store. Sam turns back to Ellie, who’s gotten the door open and is clearing the room, holding her gun out and frowning the same grumpy way Joel does when he clears a room. Sam hangs back, propping the door open in case they have to run, but it’s clear. He follows her inside and sure enough, this room is filled with shelves full of boxes of different things.

Ellie looks through the boxes in the section of the shelves labeled Kids Shoes and pulls out one labeled Sorel, with a pair of winter boots his size inside. She hands it to him and he sits down on the floor to slip off his ratty tennis shoes that Henry traded for back home in the QZ this summer when Sam got a hole in his old shoes, his favorite ones with the velcro straps and the pictures of the weird little yellow rabbit alien guy, Pikachu, on them. Sam puts on the boots and grins. He’s pretty sure it’s the first time his feet have been warm in weeks.

After scrounging around for a little while, Ellie finds a pair of dark blue lace-up winter boots for herself, too, and a leather coat that’s way too big for either of them, or even Henry, probably, but it might fit Joel. Sam tries the coat on and they both laugh at how it goes down past his knees.

“What sports do you wish you could have played, if you lived before the outbreak?” Ellie asks. She takes a tennis ball from a tube on one of the shelves and tosses it to him, although it’s hard to catch with the coat’s long sleeves covering his hands.

“Hockey,” Sam finger-spells, getting up and miming hitting a puck with a hockey stick. It’s a word like Halloween and archaeologist and all the swear words Ellie wants to learn, it’s not one that’s in any ASL dictionary he’s seen.

“Yeah, the kind on ice?” Ellie says. “At school, when I was little, we played floor hockey sometimes in gym class, but it would probably be more fun if you got to skate.”

Sam remembers that there was a fact about skating from his Fifty States book and he digs through his backpack to find it, taking out his compass and his Yoda toy to find it.

“What happened to his sword?” Ellie asks.

“It broke off,” Sam signs with a shrug.

Ellie frowns sympathetically. “You still have it?”

Sam nods, rummaging around in the pocket of the backpack where he stashed the sword. Ellie goes into her bag and digs out a roll of duct tape, tearing off a tiny piece. She gestures for him to hand the toy to her and she carefully reattaches the sword to Yoda’s hand, wrapping the tape around it so that it will stay in place. As she’s handing the toy back to him, she freezes, glancing behind him towards the door, hearing something. Sam tenses, but Ellie quickly shakes her head reassuringly.

“Joel’s calling for us.”

Sam follows her back out of the backroom into the main store. He spots Joel, who’s walking around quicker than he normally does, looking down each of the aisles for something. For them, Sam realizes. Joel turns around and spots the two of them, and the expression on his face quickly shifts from wide-eyed panic to a deep frown.

“Where the hell were you?” Joel asks, walking over to them. Sam doesn’t have to be able to hear it to know that Joel’s yelling at them.

Ellie’s eyes have gone big and she gestures to the door they came out of. “Just in the back room, we were looking for boots, like you told us to.”

She gestures to their new boots, but Joel doesn’t seem impressed.

“You don’t go wandering off where I can’t see you, part of the building that we didn’t even fucking clear.” This is directed at Ellie, so Sam slowly starts to slink away, but Joel shifts his gaze to him, shaking his head, talking slower as he attempts to sign as he talks. “No, you should know this, too. You two need to get it together. We have had some mighty close calls, and goofin’ off like this could get you killed.”

Ellie’s taken a step in front of Sam, and he can’t catch everything that she says, but catches her saying, “We weren’t ‘goofing off,’ we were doing what you said to do—”

She pauses mid-sentence, staring at Joel. His face has gone pale and he’s leaning forward, bracing himself with his hand on a shelf, his other hand clutching his chest, staring off into the distance, breathing weird. Joel’s old, but Sam’s pretty sure that he’s not so old that he’s just going to fall over and die, although looking at him now, he’s not so sure. Sam glances back over at Ellie, who’s watching Joel, too, eyes wide, looking about as terrified as Sam feels.

“What the fuck?” Ellie says. “Are you fuckin’— dying, or what?”

Joel waves her off, shaking his head, although it isn’t very convincing.

She frowns. “Should I go get Henry?”

He shakes his head again, taking a slow breath. “I’m fine. Just all the, uh, walking around in here just now, out of breath.”

They all stand there, frozen, while Joel catches his breath. Ellie’s eyes don’t move away from him, but as he recovers, a scowl settles over her face.

“Do we need anything else in here?” she asks.

Joel shakes his head and Ellie nods curtly and briskly heads out of the store. Sam slips off the big leather coat and hands it to Joel before following Ellie out the door.

—

It’s cold enough outside that evening that Joel lets them start a fire, and Ellie sits as close as she can to it, which Joel usually responds to with a gruff “Scoot back, you’re gonna singe your eyebrows off,” but he doesn’t say anything this time. He’s been weirder and grumpier and quieter than usual since the whole incident at Dick’s.

Ellie pulls her knees tighter to her chest, letting the campfire smoke blow into her eyes. She knows she fucked up. Joel’s never yelled at her before. He’s been stern, and he’s been irritated with her, and he’s yelled to get her attention, but he’s never yelled at her. Most adults yell at her, she’s not fucking surprised by it, but it still bothers her that Joel would yell at her.

Still, she feels bad for scaring him and making him have a fucking heart attack or whatever. She doesn’t feel bad for looking for shit in the back room, it was the smart thing to do, but she probably should have told him what she was doing. But he hasn’t said anything about it, so she’s not going to, either.

Her feet do feel a lot better in her new boots. Even with it being as cold as it is outside, her ankle isn’t aching the way it normally does now in the cold. She carefully re-ties the laces and double-knots them. Glancing up, she sees Henry, sitting on a log a little ways back from the fire, digging through his bag and pulling out a blue jar labeled leave-in conditioner and a wide-toothed comb.

“Look what I found at the drugstore,” he says to Sam, holding up the conditioner.

Sam rolls his eyes and signs, “My hair is fine.”

Henry gives him a look. “It’s gonna be one big knot by the time we get to Wyoming, if it doesn’t all break off before then. Just be glad it’s too cold out to wash it.”

Sam pouts, but he sits down in front of Henry anyways. He wets Sam’s hair with water from his canteen and works in the conditioner, working on detangling Sam’s hair in silence for a while. Sam leans his head on his brother’s knee, his eyelids starting to droop, although whenever Henry hits a knot with the comb, his eyes go big and he winces and frowns.

“I’ve been thinking,” Ellie says, needing to fill the silence. “Let’s say we find the Fireflies, it all works, they draw my blood and put it through some of their fancy machines and make a cure. Then what? Like, what do we do?”

Joel raises an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s ‘we’?”

“Okay, fine. Whatever. You.” Ellie hopes that she doesn’t sound as stung as she feels. She regroups. “You all can do anything you want. Where are you going? What are you doing?”

Joel stays quiet, but Henry chimes in, stopping combing so he can sign as he speaks.

“Well, I’d get a Harley Davidson and drive— and I don’t know, anywhere.” He pauses for a moment to think about it. “Maybe go see the ocean.”

“I did that,” Joel says.

Henry looks over at him. “Saw the ocean?”

Joel shakes his head. “Rode a Harley.”

“You’re shitting me.” Henry leans in, his elbows on his knees.

Joel shakes his head again, pursing his lips.

“What the fuck is a Harley?” Ellie asks.

“A motorcycle,” Joel says. “For Tommy’s birthday, the first year after he came back from the army, that’s all he wanted to do— rent two Harleys and drive cross country.”

“Man, I could die happy if I could just ride one around the block.” Henry shakes his head, imagining it. “What was it like?”

“It was good,” Joel says with a shrug.

“Good?” Henry says, jokingly indignant, elbowing Ellie. “Can you believe this guy? C’mon, man, give me details. Describe it.”

Ellie raises an eyebrow. “Do you two need some privacy?”

Henry laughs. “Ellie, this isn’t just any regular motorcycle. You get on that bad boy, you feel that engine. Nothing like it.”

She wrinkles her nose. “How would you know?”

“I’ve seen it in my dreams,” he teases, going back to working on Sam’s hair.

Ellie snorts and turns to Joel, giving him a pointed look, secretly searching his face to try and see if he’s still mad at her, which she’s pretty sure he’s not, although it is a little hard to tell, he does have an asshole face.

“Anything you want,” she repeats. “What are you gonna do?”

“It’s never been an option.” He clears his throat. “Maybe an old farmhouse, some land. A ranch.”

She nods. “Cool. What kind?”

“Sheep,” he says. “I would raise sheep.”

“Sheep,” Ellie repeats to herself, chuckling to herself at the image of Joel on a ranch, chasing after sheep with a shepherd’s crook like that girl in the nursery rhyme book she stole from the school library when she was little.

“They’re quiet,” he adds, deadpan, “do what they’re told.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” She smiles. “So, just you and a bunch of sheep. Romantic. Maybe you can go on double-dates with Henry and his motorcycle.”

Sam nearly falls over giggling.

“What about you?” Joel asks, his voice a little softer. “Where are you gonna go?”

Ellie already knows what her answer would be, she’s known it long before she knew she was immune. She and Riley used to play this game a lot, imagining the things that they would do in a different life.

“It’s probably because I grew up in the QZ. Behind you, there’s ocean, and ahead of you, there’s a wall. Nowhere else to look but up.” She glances up at the night sky as she says it. She’s never been good at knowing the names of the constellations, but there’s so many more stars to see up here than there were in the QZ. It’s a full moon. “I read everything I could in the school library. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell. But you know who my favorite is?”

“Sally Ride,” Joel answers automatically.

“Sally fuckin’ Ride. Best astronaut name ever.” She’s quiet for a moment, the reality of the situation hitting her, the fact that even if they can make a cure, things like NASA probably won’t ever exist again, but she brushes it off. “How about you, Sammy? What are you gonna do after we make a cure?”

“I’m going to be an archaeologist,” Sam signs, spelling out the word.

“You gonna go to Pompeii?” Ellie asks.

He grins and nods. Henry’s finished detangling Sam’s hair and has started combing into small, square sections so he can braid it. Box braids, she remember Riley calling them.

“Can I help?” Ellie asks.

Henry nods, moving over so that he can demonstrate. “You’re gonna want to take the comb and make a section about this big, and then split it—”

“I know,” she cuts him off. She situates herself so that she’s on the other side of Sam’s head from where Henry’s working, takes a small section and starts braiding, the motion clunky at first, and then the muscle memory comes back to her hands, folding the strands over each other and twisting the end of the braid around her finger so it curls and doesn’t come undone as easily.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Henry asks.

“My friend Riley,” she says, realizing with an ache that it’s the first time she’s said her name since everything happened. “Sometimes I helped her with her hair, in the back where she couldn’t reach.”

When Riley first came to FEDRA school, she always wore her tight curls pulled back in a bun. As she and Ellie became friends, she trusted her more with her hair and would let her help put her hair into braids and twists, especially in the winter when it would get dry and brittle if she left it down. The night they broke into the 7-Eleven, Riley had been so excited to find the type of hair gel that her mom used to use. Sometimes at night, Riley would sometimes take the jar out and smell it when she thought Ellie wasn’t looking. The smell reminded her of her mom, which Ellie kind of understands now, the scent of Sam’s conditioner is not quite the same, but reminiscent, of the stuff that Riley had.

Riley came back from the Fireflies that last night with a bunch of long blonde braids woven into her hair, all braided into one big braid. Ellie hadn’t asked her about it until later, after they got bit, while they were waiting it out in the Halloween store. The Fireflies had access to all kinds of smuggled shit, including hair, apparently, and some of them had spent a whole evening helping Riley with her braids. She told Ellie that it was one of the things that reminded her of home, of having a family.

Inevitably, those memories bleed into her last glimpse of Riley as Ellie left the mall with the Fireflies, Riley’s blonde braids stained red. Ellie pushes that thought out of her mind, focusing on braiding instead, counting the number of times she crosses the strands over each other.

When they’re done, Henry holds out his knife so that Sam can see his reflection in it. Sam scoots closer to the fire so that he can see better and grins, shaking his head a little so that the braids shake back and forth.

“You need to comb your hair, too,” Joel says to Ellie.

She shrugs. “It’s fine.”

He gives her a look. “I ain’t handing you off to the Fireflies with your hair in a rat’s nest.”

She frowns, trying not to show how alarmed she feels by how casually he says handing you off, even though she knows that’s obviously what the plan is. “Not like we’re finding them any time soon, and it’s not like they need my fucking hair to be pretty to find a vaccine.”

She goes to take out her makeshift hair tie anyways, although it takes a moment, her hair is tangled around it after having been up in a ponytail for so long. She takes the comb and starts combing at the ends and works up towards the roots so the comb doesn’t get caught it the knots, the way that one of the teachers at the orphanage had shown her when she turned four and became responsible for brushing her own hair. She feels a stupid pang of jealousy that Sam’s twice the age she was then and still doesn’t have to comb his own hair.

She finishes running the comb through her hair and pulls her hair back into a tight ponytail.

“If you braid it, it won’t get as tangled next time,” Joel says.

Ellie nods, it makes sense, but she’s never attempted braiding her own hair before.

“You want help?” Henry asks.

She shakes her head, taking her hair tie back out and putting it on her wrist. “No, I’ve got it."

She reaches her hands behind her head and attempts to start a braid, but it’s different from working with Riley’s hair, or Sam’s, it’s harder to get her hair to stay in place, especially when she can’t fucking see it. She stops and shrugs, giving up.

“Here,” Joel says, shaking his head and stepping in.

He brushes the stray wisps of hair away from her face with his hand and gathers her hair up, then splits it into three sections and braids it. He’s quick at it, like he’s had practice. She shoots a bemused look at Henry, but he doesn’t look nearly as surprised as Ellie feels. Joel holds out his hand for her hair tie and ties it off at the end.

“How do you know how to braid?” Ellie asks, glancing up at him and catching the same quick, distant, almost soft look in his eyes that she spotted when they’d talked about hiking ages ago.

He shrugs brusquely. “Just something most people know.”

“Did you have, like, long hair?” she teases, recognizing that she’s not going to get a real answer to her first question.

Sam laughs, looking from Ellie back to Joel, eagerly awaiting a response. Joel rolls his eyes.

“It’s late,” he says. “You two need to get to sleep.”

Ellie raises an eyebrow at him. “I hope when we find your brother, he has pictures of your beautiful flowing hair. Were you a, um—” she pauses for a moment, searching for the word, “a hippie?”

He raises an eyebrow in return. “How old do you think I am?”

“Like, a thousand. I don’t fuckin’ know.” She smiles and pats her braid. “You think my hair’s nice enough that the Fireflies’ll let me in now?”

“Definitely,” Joel says. “Fanciest hair of any immune kid they’ve got there.”

—

The kids are both asleep, huddled together, snug in their sleeping bags with the hoods of their coats pulled up to protect them from the cold wind, Ellie clutching her knife under her chin.

His mind keeps circling back to that momentary panic of not knowing where the kids were, and the way that fear just continued to spiral even after finding them, his chest so tight that he couldn’t breathe, his vision tunneling, his hands shaking, crushed by the weight of the inevitability of him failing them. We were doing what you said to do, Ellie’s indignant little voice echoes in his mind, which is enough to nearly send him into another spiral.

He forces himself to stop that train of thought, Tess’ words in the back of his mind, I need you to take a breath, and he brings himself back to the present. He glances over at Henry, who’s supposed to be on second watch later and getting some sleep himself now, but instead he’s still watching the campfire, frowning, fiddling with the comb.

“You alright?” Joel asks.

“Yeah,” Henry says. “Just thinking.”

Joel hums in response.

“Sam told me you yelled at him and Ellie back at the store,” Henry says matter-of-factly.

Joel snorts. “He also tell you they wandered off into the back room without telling me?”

Henry nods. “He’s not a very good tattletale, he tells on himself more than anybody else.”

“They were fine. I should’ve kept a closer eye on them. Shouldn’t have lost my temper with them, I just—” He shakes his head. “Scared the shit out of me, thinking they were— lost.”

Henry glances down at the comb and up at Joel.

“What was her name?” he asks.

Joel blinks. He isn’t necessarily surprised by the question, Henry’s known that much about him from the moment they met. You’re not her dad, but you were someone’s.

A month ago, maybe even a week ago, he would have ignored the question. He shut down any mention Tommy made of her over the past twenty years. Tess knew he’d had a kid, he knew she had, too, but anything beyond that was a firm line they didn’t cross.

But the further west they’ve gone, the more he’s secretly begun to wonder if Tommy’s out there at all. When Ellie asked him today if he was dying, he hadn’t been sure if it was the truth when he told her he wasn’t. If he’s gone, and Tommy’s gone, then she’s really gone, too. The thought of her being lost like that, not even her name in someone’s memory, absolutely guts him.

He looks back up at Henry, who’s still watching him, waiting for a response. Joel glances away, and in spite of every instinct he has to keep it all locked away and buried deep down inside of himself, he tells him.

“Sarah.”

It’s barely audible, but Henry still hears it because he nods, clearly wanting to ask more, but thankfully, he holds off.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead.

Joel nods once. “It ain’t something we’re going to talk about.”

“Yeah, no, I—”

Joel shakes his head, sharply cutting him off. “We ain’t talking about it.”

Henry nods, going to his backpack and getting out his sleeping bag. Joel takes the rifle and settles in to keep watch, glancing up at the moon casting a pale light over the prairie beyond him.

—

Ellie lays still in her sleeping bag, keeping her eyes closed, not moving to brush away the strand of hair that’s fallen in front of her face, listening to Sam’s soft snoring and the howling wind and the rustling of the prairie grass, turning the conversation over and over in her head.

Sarah.

Chapter Text

The day that they finally make it to the Wyoming border, marked by a Welcome to Wyoming! sign adorned with the faded silhouette of a cowboy on a bucking horse, it’s not the way Ellie imagined it.

For one thing, snow is falling, the way it has been pretty consistently for what feels like weeks now. In her mind, when she’d imagined finally making it out of Nebraska, they would have seen the golden, sunlit prairies of Wyoming that she remembered from the pictures in her United States geography textbook at school a couple years ago.

She also figured the moment would be something more celebratory, but instead, when she points out the sign, she just gets a couple of tired nods from Joel and Henry, and she can practically read their thoughts— Cody, where Joel’s brother’s radio messages were coming from, is in the northwest part of the state, opposite from where they are now. They’re barely halfway there.

Sam, at least, returns Ellie’s high-five when he sees the road sign, although he frowns as he glances around the dreary, snow-dusted expanse in front of them.

“It’s boring here, too,” he signs, disappointed.

Joel huffs a laugh. “Ain’t exactly Disney World, huh?”

“Did you go there, before?” Ellie asks. With Sarah, she adds silently, although she knows better than to say that out loud. After overhearing his conversation with Henry, a lot of the random shit that Joel knows about makes more sense, knowing he had a kid once. It explains a lot of things about him, really.

He shakes his head at her question. “Out of my price range.”

“I went there,” Henry said. “The summer before the outbreak, my mom and dad and I went.”

“You saw the guy in the mouse costume and all that shit?” Ellie asks. “Chuck E. Cheese or whatever?”

“Mickey Mouse,” Henry corrects her.

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, I didn’t realize we were in the presence of a mouse character expert.”

Sam frowns, tugging on Henry’s sleeve. “What are you talking about?”

“A theme park in Florida. It’s—” he pauses for a moment, trying to think of how to explain it, “a place people would go for fun, with rollercoasters and people in costumes and stuff.”

Sam nods, although he’s still clearly confused. Ellie doesn’t really get it, either, but she knows that it’s one of those things from before the outbreak that old people are nostalgic about. Her language arts teacher back in Boston last year spent a whole class period telling them about Cedar Point. It’s strange to imagine the world the way it was then, with whole big places dedicated just to fun shit like that.

The first city they make it to is Cheyenne. None of the cities out here were big enough to have their own quarantine zones, the people who lived here probably got shipped off to the QZs in Denver or Salt Lake if the government bothered to collect them at all, and the rest of them were left to fend for themselves, which didn’t last long.

It seems to be harder for infected to survive in colder climates, so the harsh winters out here have eradicated a lot more infected than there are in warmer places. Harder for people to survive in those climates, too, though.

Cheyenne, for the most part, seems like it’s abandoned. There’s signs that there were people here once: a few notes left behind, spare supplies here and there, a couple of stray infected off in the distance. Henry kills one of them, and Ellie takes the other one out in one shot, grinning over at Joel as soon as she does.

“What have I told you about keeping that thing in your pack?” he says, gesturing to her gun, which she did whip out of her coat pocket, but she’s pretty sure he’s not really upset about it. Annoyed, maybe, but not mad.

As they head northwest, it’s the same in Laramie, Casper, Buffalo. Each town is the same, one way or another. No people to be found, no radio towers, and certainly no sign of Tommy. The amount of daylight each day dwindles, it keeps getting colder out, and the long stretches of crumbling highway and frozen prairie seem to stretch out longer every day, the mountains looming closer the further west they walk. Joel puts a mark through each town on the map as they make their way through it, and the number of towns left is dwindling.

It’s harder to sign with their gloves on, and there’s not that much to talk about, anyways, so Ellie and Sam have made up a lot of games. When the sun’s out, they play shadow tag, where you have to tag the other person by stepping on their shadow. When there wasn’t as much snow, they spent a couple days kicking a rock down the road the whole time they were walking until it wore down into a smooth, tiny pebble. For a while they played a lot of twenty questions and even got Henry and Joel to play it with them sometimes, but they’ve played it so many times by now that it’s gotten boring because it’s too easy to guess. Joel almost always chooses old musicians, and Henry usually chooses some sort of car, and Sam chooses volcano as his word practically half of the time.

They’ve found five more issues of Savage Starlight along the way since they left Kansas City, and Ellie and Sam have read all of them so many times over that they’ve made a game out of memorizing the stories and reciting them, quizzing each other on the exact lines of dialogue, with the added challenge of having to translate the sci-fi jargon into sign language, either by spelling out the words or inventing signs.

As they trudge onward one chilly afternoon, their footsteps quieted by the freshly fallen snow, Sam elbows Ellie and she looks over at him.

“Captain Ryan,” he signs, “the Travelers have boarded the ship, they’re in engineering.”

“Not today, Dr. Star,” Ellie signs back.

He shakes his head. “He says, ‘Not on my watch.’”

She rolls her eyes. “Same thing.”

He raises his eyebrows. “That’s not the game.”

“Fine.” She pauses for a moment, trying to visualize the speech bubble in the comic. “Not on my watch, Dr. Star. CBB-73, divert all gamma power to the blasters.”

“Weapons systems at maximum capacity,” Sam signs, moving his hands jerkily to mimic the robot character’s voice. “Targeting algorithms optimized for enemy combatants.”

“Rally the crew, Captain Ryan. We’ve got to move fast, the Travelers won’t stop until they’ve—”

She nearly bumps into Joel, who’s stopped walking, holding an arm out to keep them from moving forward.

Ellie follows his gaze to a weathered road sign up ahead that says Cody - 1 Mile. She glances back up at him.

“What are we gonna do if Tommy’s not here?” she asks quietly. It had been a hypothetical question months ago when she’d asked him before in the truck, but it feels a whole lot more real now that they’re here.

Joel frowns and shakes his head as if that’s not even a possibility. “We’ll find him.”

She wonders if Sarah believed him when he said shit like that.

They stay on the outer edges of the town, up on a hill where they can see the main street, but even from a distance, it’s clear that something’s off with Cody. Storefront windows are shattered, and branches of cordyceps like they’d seen in the open city in Boston grow across the cracked roads and up the walls of the once-quaint Old West-style buildings lining the street. Ellie scrunches her nose at the distinct, sickly smell of infected, although she can’t see any at first. There’s a low, pervasive humming sound, and she realizes with a shiver that it’s their groans echoing from somewhere through the streets.

“Watch your step,” Joel tells them in a low whisper, gesturing to the fungus on the ground, barely visible below the dusting of snow, and carefully stepping over it.

Ellie carefully watches the ground as she follows Joel’s footsteps, then glances back down at the town.

“Oh, shit,” she says, and the others follow her gaze.

Off in the distance, gathered in a cluster at the side of a row of buildings at the bottom of the hill, there’s dozens of them. It’s not unlike the horde she and Joel saw in Boston, moving aimlessly, but in synchronicity. The cold weather has slowed them down to be nearly stagnant, but they still are moving. Ellie freezes, her eyes wide, holding her breath, glancing up at Joel and Henry to see what they should do next.

“You don’t want to get any closer than that,” a woman’s voice whispers from behind them, making Ellie nearly jump out of her skin.

Joel steps in front of Ellie as they turn around. A middle-aged woman with her hair shaved into a buzz cut, and a tall, dark-haired boy probably a few years older than Ellie, stand behind them, holding their guns pointed towards them. Ellie raises her hands, seeing that Joel and Henry are doing the same. Sam’s ducked behind Henry, and Ellie takes a step closer to him.

The woman silently gestures with her head for them to follow her. Joel glances back at the town for a moment, wondering, Ellie figures, if Tommy’s there somewhere, but then he nods in agreement. The rest of them follow suit. They walk silently and carefully, headed off in a different direction than they came from, until they must be what the woman considers to be a safe distance away.

“You’re not from around here,” she says once they’ve gotten a distance from the town, not a question but a statement of fact.

Joel shakes his head. “No, ma’am. We’re, uh— just passing through.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Pretty fucking far off the beaten path to just be passing through.”

“We were looking for someone who’d been in contact with me from the radio tower here in Cody, but it seems like it ain’t likely we’ll find him.”

A curious look passes over the woman’s face and she exchanges a look with the boy.

“Who are you looking for in Cody?” she asks.

“My brother,” Joel says. “His name’s Tommy.”

“I don’t know a Tommy,” the woman says, “but you’re welcome to come back with us to the radio tower and see if there’s someone who does.”

Ellie looks over at Joel again, who gives the woman a curt nod, then glances over at her and Henry and signs, “Stay on guard.”

They continue to follow them up the road in silence for a while, further away from the town and back onto another long, dull stretch of road. Ellie looks over at Joel and then up ahead.

“I’m Ellie,” she says.

“I’m Jen,” the woman says. “This is my son Sean.”

“Your hair’s really cool,” Ellie tells her. “I wanted to shave my head, especially after I got lice last year, it was really fucking gross, but I don’t know if I could pull it off.”

A hint of a smile crosses Jen’s otherwise stern face. “I think you could. Are you all from the Denver QZ?”

Ellie starts to answer, but decides to stay quiet, deferring to Joel.

“Boston,” he says.

“My brother and I came from Kansas City,” Henry adds.

“We heard on the radio that they overthrew FEDRA,” Sean says.

Jen frowns. “Kind of a shit show there, I imagine.”

Henry nods in agreement. “Yeah, not that it wasn’t before.”

Eventually, they come upon a large building with a glass front and a sign that reads Yellowstone Regional Airport. Sam tugs on Ellie’s coat sleeve and excitedly points at the sign.

“Are there airplanes here?” Ellie asks.

“One, out back on the tarmac,” Jen says. “It was a small airport, they really just flew hikers here from Denver and back. People used to go hiking out on the trails around here, Yellowstone National Park. Wait here for a minute, I’ll go get our radio operator.”

They’re left waiting outside with Sean, who shifts uncomfortably from one foot to another, glancing back at the glass doors every now and again. It’s hard to see through the double sets of glass doors, but there’s hints of movement inside.

“A lot of people living here?” Henry asks.

Sean frowns, giving him a skeptical look.

“We ain’t trying to ambush you,” Joel adds, shaking his head a little at Henry, “just making conversation.”

Jen comes back a couple minutes later with another woman, short and thin with her thick black hair tied back in a ponytail.

“This is my partner, Vivian,” Jen says. “She’s the radio operator.”

“Viv,” the other woman introduces herself, reaching out to shake Joel and Henry’s hands, and offering a friendly wave to Ellie and Sam.

As Joel starts explaining the story about Tommy to her, the word partner starts rolling around in Ellie’s head, and she glances between the two women, trying to figure out what she meant by it. It’s a weird, ambiguous word, that sometimes means you work together, and sometimes means you’re dating or married or whatever. She watches the way that they share quick glances as Joel’s talking and seem to wordlessly communicate with each other. Jen had introduced Sean as her son, but he has the same almond-shaped eyes and dark hair that Viv has.

Ellie finds herself lost in thought over it until she suddenly realizes with a start that she wasn’t paying attention at all to the conversation.

“He doesn’t live in Cody,” Viv is saying. “He came out here to get your messages, and sometimes he radioed messages in from somewhere else, although he wasn’t forthcoming about where, exactly. He lived in another settlement as far as I could tell.”

“Do you have any idea where that might be?” Joel asks.

She shrugs. “He kept quiet about it, but I know the times he came up here, it seemed like he was coming from southwest of here.” Viv glances over at Jen. “There’s rumors—”

“There’s no rumors,” Jen interrupts her with a long-suffering shake of her head, “it’s your personal conspiracy theory.”

“There’s reason to believe,” Viv continues on, ignoring her, “that there might be a settlement somewhere out in the Tetons, probably around Jackson Hole.”

Joel pulls out his map, finding Jackson Hole and tracing a path from there to Cody. Ellie leans in closer to see. Mostly forests and mountains between here and there.

“And you think that’s where Tommy is?” Joel says.

“Possibly. It would make sense—”

A frigid, whistling, blustering gust of wind interrupts her, making all of them shiver. The women exchange another wordless conversation

Jen turns to them, her eyes narrowed. “You’re welcome to come in, but we will not tolerate any bullshit. We don’t have much worth stealing.”

Joel hesitates, seeming to be weighing his options. Another cold breeze blows through and Sam sneezes, wiping his nose with his sleeve, and that seems to make up Henry’s mind.

“Understood,” he says, wrapping an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “We aren’t looking for any trouble.”

He glances over at Joel, who sighs and shrugs, clearly not thrilled with the idea, but he gestures for Ellie to go ahead and tightens his grip on the strap of his rifle as he follows her.

“If we were going to shoot you, we would’ve by now,” Viv tells him matter-of-factly.

Sean opens the doors and they walk into the small airport, which is surprisingly well kept-up in comparison to the rest of Cody. There’s a few rows of stiff leather-covered chairs, where Ellie assumes people must have once waited for their plane to arrive, and a few makeshift cots and sleeping bags lay on the floor between some of them. There’s about a dozen people milling around, a few older adults, probably Joel’s age or older, and couple of people closer to Henry’s age, all bundled up in winter coats since it’s not that warm inside. Everyone gives the four of them wary, sidelong glances as they walk by.

A plastic dollhouse is set up in one corner of the large room and a couple of pots are set up over sterno flames on the countertop of a large podium by the window. On the wall, there’s an old mural depicting a mountain range at sunset with a river cutting through the mountains and a geyser blowing in the background, with large block letters across the topic of the painting: Explore Yellowstone National Park!

Sam points out the geyser to Henry and asks if they can go see it in real life. Henry smiles and signs back, “Probably not.”

“Jenny, who are these people?” an old man sitting in one of the chairs asks.

“I told you when I came in to get Viv,” Jen says, “they’re just visitors, they were in touch with someone on the radio here, they’re trying to track him down.”

“Visitors,” the man repeats, as if it’s a novel idea, which, Ellie supposes, it probably is.

“How long have y’all been living here?” Joel asks.

“About three years,” Viv says. “There used to be a larger settlement closer to town, we were there for about ten years, but it’s gotten overrun by infected out there the past few years, it wasn’t safe to stay there.”

They’re joined by two kids, a girl about Ellie’s age with chin-length black hair, and a little girl, maybe four or five years old, with blonde hair tied up in scrawny pigtails, who stares up at Ellie with big, unblinking eyes. Ellie waves and the little girl ducks behind the older girl’s legs, then peeks out and stares some more.

“Hey,” Jen says to the girls, putting her hand affectionately on the little girl’s head.

Viv gestures to the girls. “These are our younger two kids, Katie and Lily.”

The older girl rolls her eyes. “I go by Cat, no one’s called me Katie besides you and Mom since I was, like, three.”

“My apologies,” Viv says jokingly, then gives her a concerned look. “If you’re out here, who’s manning the radio?”

Cat shrugs a little sheepishly. “We hardly ever get any messages, anyways.”

Viv sighs, a little annoyed but not mad— it reminds Ellie of the way Joel reacts when she does something dumb. She’s always thought of it as just Joel-like, but maybe it’s another thing about him that’s actually a parent thing. Viv goes back to the radio, and the rest of them go to sit down over in the chairs. The four of them sit across from Jen and the kids. While the adults go back to talking, Lily turns her big-eyed stare to Sam, who gives her an unsettled look back in return.

“Stop being so weird,” Cat says, elbowing her little sister. Apologetically, she tells Sam, “We don’t see new people very often.”

Sam glances up at Ellie, who translates what Cat said into sign language.

“He’s deaf,” Ellie explains.

“Oh,” Cat says. “That’s awesome.”

“That’s awesome?” Sean repeats with a smirk.

Cat rolls her eyes and kicks his ankle. “Not that he’s deaf— I mean, not that that’s a bad thing, but, like, knowing sign language or whatever. You know what I mean.”

“What’re you talking about?” Lily whines, kicking her tiny boots against the metal legs of the chair.

“He’s deaf, that means he can’t hear,” Sean explains, tapping his ear. He gestures to the old man from earlier. “Kind of like Mr. Dennis.”

Lily nods, then looks back at Sam and asks him in a very loud voice, “You wanna see my toys?”

She points to the plastic dollhouse across the room and Sam nods, understanding without needing a translation, and he gets up to go follow her. Henry and Joel both freeze mid-conversation, watching him. Henry stomps his foot twice to get Sam’s attention and shakes his head when Sam turns to look at him.

“Stay here,” Henry signs.

Sam pouts and gestures towards the dollhouse.

“Please?” he signs, tracing a circle his chest with his fist and making his eyes all big and sad.

Henry sighs and turns to look at Ellie. “Can you go stay over there with him?”

Ellie nods. She heads over to join the little kids over by the dollhouse, where Lily is showing Sam her ragtag crew of toys: a small baby doll with one eye permanently stuck open, a superhero action figure, a plastic cup with a face drawn on it, a Barbie doll in a faded ballgown who’s too big to fit in the house, and a handful of tiny plastic dolls in weird rubbery dresses.

Sam’s gotten his Yoda action figure out of his bag to show Lily, who gasps when she sees it and reaches for it. He clutches it to his chest, glancing worriedly over at Ellie.

“That’s Sam’s toy,” Ellie says, sitting down on the floor between the two of them. “What’s your dolls’ names?”

Lily points to the dolls and lists off their names, most of which are either nonsense words or some variation of her siblings’ names.

“You be the baby,” she says, handing Ellie that doll.

“Sorry,” Cat says to Ellie, sitting down on the other side of Lily. “Lil, she doesn’t wanna play.”

Ellie shrugs. “I don’t mind.”

“Well, you say that now, but we’ll see how you feel three hours from now when she’s trapped you in some elaborate doll game that you’re somehow playing wrong no matter what you have the dolls do.”

Ellie laughs.

“Is he your dad?” Cat asks, gesturing towards Joel, who’s looking over the map again with Henry and Jen.

“He’s responsible for me,” Ellie says, using the same phrasing Joel used when he first explained their situation to Henry months ago.

“They’re nice to you, though?” Cat asks pointedly, then adds, “My moms wanted me to ask.”

“Yeah, they’re nice,” Ellie says. She stays quiet for a moment, and then her curiosity gets the better of her. “They’re both your moms?”

Cat nods. “I mean, Viv is my real mom, but she and Jen have been together since Sean and I were little, and they both adopted Lily when her real mom got bit when she was a baby.” She narrows her eyes at Ellie. “Are you, like, weird about gay people?”

“No,” Ellie says, maybe too quickly. “No, that’s really— cool. They seem cool.”

Cat snorts. “I mean, they’re lame. But, yeah.”

Ellie glances over at Sam and Lily, who are playing with the dollhouse. Lily doesn’t really seem to understand that Sam can’t hear her, but she seems perfectly happy to chatter away at him while he walks his Yoda figurine around the dollhouse.

“So, what do you do for fun here?” Ellie asks, cringing at how awkward she sounds. She’s never been great at making friends, and after months of only talking to an eight-year-old, and in sign language at that, it’s really weird trying to make conversation with a kid her own age.

Cat doesn’t seem to mind, though, and she shows her their small collection of books and magazines and their collection of board games and she tells her about how a few times they’ve gone and explored the inside of the plane, and how she and her brother figured out how to do stick-and-poke tattoos. Cat offers to give her one, and Ellie laughs, then shakes her head when she realizes she’s being serious.

“What design would you do, if you wanted one?” Cat asks.

Ellie shrugs, thinking about it for a moment. “It’s super fuckin’ dorky, but do you know Savage Starlight, the comic book series?” Cat shakes her head. “Well, I would get a design of the Kobyashi, the spaceship from it. It’s really cool-looking. Here.”

She digs through her backpack and finds the issue where Daniella Star first boards the ship, flipping through to find the panel with the picture of the ship off in the distance in the sky, and hands it to Cat.

“Oh, that would be sick,” Cat says. She thumbs through the pages and her eyes light up. “Can I read this?”

Ellie nods. While Cat looks through the comic, Ellie looks over to watch the adults. Joel’s still talking with Jen, glancing up occasionally to scan the room. He makes eye contact with Ellie and she gives him a thumbs up. He nods at her, going back to studying the map.

Ellie turns her attention to Henry, who seems less invested in studying the route and more interested in watching Sam playing. She feels a little annoyed at first, she’s not sure why he sent her over to keep an eye on Sam if he was going to be watching him anyways.

He starts scanning the room like Joel, but he’s not looking for threats. It’s not just Sam playing that he’s thinking about, Ellie realizes. It’s this whole place.

There’s warm food to eat here, shelter from the elements and from the infected. More people than just her and Joel to rely on.

There’s no reason why Sam and Henry would need to come with her and Joel to find Tommy if they found somewhere safe to stay first.

Ellie frowns, pulling her jacket tighter around herself. Anger and dread and the deep, lonely kind of sadness that she hates thinking about all pool at the pit of her stomach while her brain preemptively adds their names to the list of people who’ve left her.

Wyoming isn’t how she imagined it at all.

Chapter Text

The first and last time Henry travelled by plane, it was when he was going to Orlando with his parents as a kid. Even though the Yellowstone airport is much smaller and quieter and hasn’t been in use in twenty years, it feels strangely similar, sitting in these uncomfortable chairs, staring out the window at the plane. It’s one of those things from before the outbreak that almost feels like something he made up, the memory of those huge hunks of steel flying through the sky.

He looks over to Sam and Ellie again. They’re sitting around a table with the other kids, drawing with Sam’s crayons on pages from Ellie’s journal.

“That’s really good,” Ellie keeps telling the older girl, Cat, as she draws.

Sam glances up, catching Henry watching, and waves at him. Henry waves back. He can’t help but think about how he could probably count on one hand the number of times that Sam’s truly been safe like this.

Joel’s sitting next to Henry, still studying the map, shaking his head. Jen told them that there’s no easy way down towards Jackson, especially with the snow, and that they shouldn’t bother setting out until morning since the temperatures drop pretty fast at night.

“Do you think we should stay the night here?” Henry asks Joel now.

“Reckon it makes sense,” Joel says slowly, not taking his eyes off of the map. “It’s brisk out, and I don’t want to risk anything with the infected back in town. These folks seem trustworthy enough, but we should still trade off keeping watch.”

Henry nods. “Seems like they have a pretty good setup here, all things considered.”

Joel nods in return, sensing where the conversation is headed. “I understand, if you want to stay here. You came out here to find somewhere safe for Sam, and it seems like we’ve found it. I’ll find Tommy, but—” he shakes his head, glancing over at Henry, “I can’t guarantee that where he’s staying is better than this.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Henry says. “You’re gonna try to head to Jackson?”

Joel shrugs. “It’s the only lead we’ve got, seems like my only option.”

“If I were in your shoes, if it were Sam—” Henry shakes his head, not even able to fathom being separated from his own brother for that long, that far apart, “I’d want to keep looking, too.”

Joel nods, closing the map, crossing his arms across his chest, and leaning back in his seat. “I’ll stay here with the kids if you wanna go take a look around.”

Henry nods and gets up, noticing that a few pairs of eyes follow him as he does. Jen and Viv seem to have some trust in them because they know Joel’s brother, but no one else here has any reason to do so.

On a counter beneath a sign that says Caribou Coffee, there’s a cardboard box of books. In neat block letters, the box is labelled Cody Lending Library. There’s a few paperback novels and magazines and some kids’ books. A familiar blue cover catches his eye. Owl Moon. He thumbs through the familiar pages of the picture book. There wasn’t much of a story to it that he can remember— something about a girl and her dad going to look for owls on a cold winter night— but there was something he’d found peaceful about it when he read it as a kid.

There’s footsteps behind him. He turns, but it’s just Viv, the radio operator.

“You’re welcome to keep that if your little boy would like it,” she says, gesturing towards the book.

“He’s my brother,” Henry says automatically. “Thanks. It’s one I liked when I was little, but I don’t know if Sam’ll be that excited about it. If it doesn’t have robots or volcanoes or superheroes, it’s not typically his thing.”

She smiles and nods understandingly. “Cat was obsessed with volcanoes when she was that age. Sharks, too. I think we’ve got some clothes that will fit him. How long have you been looking after him?”

“About two years, since our mom passed away.”

Passed away feels like a disrespectfully peaceful turn of phrase. It’s not something he lets himself think about often. Neither of his parents met a peaceful end— his dad was killed a month before Sam was born, shot on sight for being out past curfew, and when his mom got sick a few years later, she refused to see FEDRA doctors on principle, choosing to fade away in pain for months instead. Then when Sam got sick, Henry turned around and worked with FEDRA, betraying his parents’ memory just as much as he betrayed Michael and the rest of the resistance. He hopes that they’d understand, that maybe they would’ve made the same choice for Sam—

“He’s lucky to have you,” Viv says, interrupting his train of thought as she hoists a plastic bin filled with clothes onto the counter

Henry shrugs. “I’m lucky to have him.”

She nods. “I’ve always said the same thing about my kids. It’s important, I think, having someone worth living for.”

He tucks the book under his arm and digs through the box of clothes, pulling out a couple of sweatshirts that should be about his size, nice for layering under his coat.

“Hi, Ellie,” Viv says.

He glances up and spots Ellie a few feet away. She looks caught off-guard by the woman knowing her name.

“Hi,” Ellie says, walking over to look at the bin of clothes, too. “Um, Joel wanted to talk to you about trading for supplies.”

“Sure,” Viv says. She pauses and, turning to Henry, says, “I know you have people to find and places to be, but if you are looking for somewhere to stay longer term, you seem like good people, and we’d be happy to have you all.”

“Thanks,” Henry says, glancing over at her. “We’ll think about it.”

Ellie’s quiet for a moment, not looking up from the box of clothes. “Are you and Sam gonna stay here?”

Henry shrugs. “I’m figuring it out. If we do, though, we’ll figure out a way to stay in touch, they’ve got the radio tower here.”

Ellie frowns and nods once in response. He can tell she wants to say more, and he knows Ellie well enough now to know that she’s afraid of being left behind. He hates the thought of being another name on the long list of people who’ve left her. But instead, she silently goes back to looking through the clothes.

“Where is Sam?” Henry asks.

She frowns harder, glaring up at him. “Joel’s still over there with him. I didn’t just abandon him with strangers we never met before.”

Henry shakes his head. “I didn’t think you would. Ellie, hey—”

“I don’t wanna fuckin’ talk about it,” she snaps. “If you’re gonna ditch us, ditch us.”

“We’re not ditching you—”

“I said I don’t wanna talk about it,” she grumbles. She gestures to the sweatshirts. “Are those for Sam?”

Henry nods.

“I’ll give them to him,” she says, picking them up and stomping off before he can respond.

That evening, they have a meager dinner with the Cody crew, potato soup, made with potatoes grown in the small greenhouse they’ve managed to put together out back. Ellie stays quiet throughout dinner, half-heartedly joking around with the other kids, translating their conversation into sign to keep Sam in the loop.

Henry leans back in his chair, wrapping his hands around the soup bowl for warmth. The adults are sitting around a group of small cafe tables, making small talk as they eat. They’ve moved onto what everyone did before the outbreak. Viv and Jen both were still in college then. Some of the others, like Joel, were grown adults with jobs— a park ranger, a librarian, a Starbucks barista— and others are closer to Henry’s age and were kids when the outbreak happened.

“What did you do before the outbreak, Joel?” Viv asks.

“I was a contractor,” he says after swallowing another spoonful of soup. “Specialized in carpentry.”

“Probably could’ve used your help a couple years back when we moved in here,” Jen says. “This place needed a lot of work.”

Sam comes over to sit by Henry, scooting himself halfway onto Henry’s chair and leaning his head against Henry’s arm.

“You tired?” Henry signs, moving over a little so Sam has more room to sit comfortably.

Sam shrugs, glancing sullenly across the room to where Ellie and Cat are poring over one of Ellie’s comics, and Henry smiles sympathetically. Sam’s never really had a friend before, and the only one he’s got is suddenly best buddies with another kid.

Henry wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to live in a world where that was the kind of shit he had to worry about— whether Sam was making friends, if he’s being included.

He looks over to see what the other kids are doing. Sean is keeping Lily occupied playing tic-tac-toe on a magnadoodle board, although she keeps taking extra turns so she can win. It reminds him of when Sam was about that age and he tried to teach him how to play rock paper scissors and he’d always wait a second to see what Henry would choose first.

“I bet Lily would let you play with her toys again if you asked,” Henry says.

Sam makes a face and shakes his head.

“She’s a baby,” he signs. “She’s not my friend.”

Henry elbows him. “Be nice.”

The sun sets soon after supper, briefly casting a golden hue over the prairie beyond the tarmac and then disappearing, making the inside of the airport dim.

“You take first watch and I’ll take second?” Joel says, and Henry nods.

It feels strange, keeping watch without having a gun in his hands, keeping watch in a room full of people.

“We aren’t gonna try to kill you in your sleep,” one of the older men, Dennis, tells him, having overheard their exchange.

Henry huffs a laugh. “I know, just habit. We don’t plan on doing that, either, for what it’s worth.”

He sits down on the floor, resting his back against the wall, and Sam pulls his sleeping bag over closer to where he’s sitting.

“Are we staying here forever?” Sam signs, his little face scrunching up.

Henry shrugs, noncommittal. “It seems like it’s a safe place to stay.”

Sam frowns and shakes his head. “We’re a team. Us and Joel and Ellie. Ellie said they’re not staying.”

Henry sighs. He should have anticipated that Ellie would say something to Sam.

“Don’t worry about it right now,” he signs, which he knows is rich coming from him, someone who worries all the fucking time.

Sam rolls his eyes, something he’s started doing a lot lately, which Henry’s not sure whether to attribute to spending so much time with Ellie or if it’s just part of growing up, turning nine in a couple of months. But Sam gets in his sleeping bag anyways and snuggles up close to Henry, holding onto the hem of Henry’s jacket the same way he used to hold the fuzzy blue blanket he carried around everywhere when he was little, which got left behind in their apartment with everything else when they were on the run.

He did what he set out to do, he reminds himself. He got Sam somewhere safe.

Still, there’s a feeling at the pit of his stomach that he can’t quite shake. He isn’t sure what to believe about the Fireflies and their cure, but the thought of leaving Joel and Ellie to continue off on their own doesn’t sit right with him.

He’s let people down before, and he can’t do that again.

—

Joel blinks, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Before he’s fully conscious, he finds himself looking for the kids, and find them both asleep in their sleeping bags on the floor of the airport gate. Henry’s sitting back down next to Sam, after having walked over to shake Joel’s shoulder to wake him up for his shift keeping watch.

“We’re gonna come with you,” Henry says as soon as Joel sits up. “To Jackson.”

Joel blinks again, his mind still clouded with sleep.

“You sure?” he says, his brow furrowing.

Henry nods, his eyes big and earnest. “I don’t know what things are like where your brother is, but— we’re a team, the four of us.”

“Well,” Joel says slowly, “you sleep on that and think it over some.”

Henry shrugs, it’s clear that he’s already made up his mind. He lays down next to Sam, wrapping an arm around him, and Sam nestles closer to him.

Joel sits up taller and settles in to keep watch with his back against the wall. Despite there being quite a few people here, it’s quiet, save for the occasional cough or murmur. Ellie stirs a little in her sleep a few feet away, holding her pocketknife a little closer to her chest and burrowing her face into her sleeping bag.

Truth be told, he’s reassured by the thought of Henry continuing to travel with them. The thought alone of something happening to Ellie because he was too slow or didn’t hear someone or something sneaking up on them sends him into a spiral if he lets himself dwell on it. But at the same time, if something happened to Sam or Henry because they stuck with him—

Not his problem, he tells himself, although the words fall flat.

Ellie’s eyes light up when Henry tells her that he and Sam are coming along that morning. Sam throws his arms around both of them, and the thought of leaving them behind feels nearly unfathomable in the morning light.

“It’s maybe safer for you to stay here,” Ellie says, a little hesitantly, as if maybe those words alone might change Henry’s mind.

“We’re a team,” Henry says warmly, shaking his head.

“We’re a team,” Ellie agrees with a small smile.

The weather is the warmest and clearest they’ve seen in days, so they head out early, saying their goodbyes, Ellie promising Cat that they’ll stay in touch as if they were heading home from summer camp.

The whole group has come out there to say goodbye. They stand at the doors, the sunrise reflected in the large glass windows at the front of the airport. Joel’s aware that it’s a novelty for them to have new people here, so it’s also a novelty to be sending them on their way.

“Good luck out there,” Jen says, scooping Lily up before she can wander off.

“If you do find something out there, we’d love to know about it,” Viv adds.

Joel nods, hoisting his backpack up higher on his shoulders and setting off.

The four of them are quiet as they leave, their boots crunching on the frost-dusted ground and their breath forming faint clouds in the dim light. They’re heading south, avoiding the infested town. Sam turns around to look back at the airport one last time, then tugs on Henry’s sleeve, signing something too quickly for Joel to understand, although he catches the last words— please ask.

Henry rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

“What’s he want you to ask?” Joel asks.

“He wants to go back and ask if we can go look inside the plane before we leave.”

There’s small, sentimental part of him that considers it for a moment, it’s not like the kid is probably going to get many other opportunities to see the inside of an airplane— but with Joel’s luck, they’d end up caught in a snowstorm or attacked by a horde because of the delay.

“It wouldn’t be very exciting,” he says.

Sam sighs dramatically, but he turns back around anyways.

—

Ellie wakes up with a shiver. She pulls her sleeping bag tighter around herself, pulling it up over her nose so her face is nearly hidden, hoping to quell the chill that feels like it’s seeped into her bones.

She swallows and winces at the sharp, sudden pain in her throat. Probably just because of the cold air, she decides. It’s been a few days since they left Cody, but even one night sleeping inside still has her missing the luxury of having a roof over her head, and it has her yearning for her bed back in Boston, which wasn’t anything fancy, but it was soft and warm, and it was hers.

She opens an eye and peeks out of her sleeping bag. Sam and Henry are both awake already, packing up their bags beside the dwindling campfire. She turns her head to find Joel, and the slight movement makes her neck feel stiff and sore. Maybe she slept on it weird.

“We need to get goin’, kiddo,” Joel says, seeing that she’s awake. He frowns as they make eye contact. “You feel alright? You look a little pale.”

She nods. “Just tired.”

Speaking sends another sharp jolt of pain through her whole neck. She frowns.

“You sound rough,” Joel says, packing up their cooking gear and giving her a concerned look, his brow furrowed.

She clears her throat and shakes her head, forcing herself to sit up. “I’m fine.”

It’s not a big deal, she decides. She almost always gets over illnesses quickly, and they’re too close to finding Joel’s brother to stop now. She can’t ignore the nagging little voice in the back of her mind, either, that reminds her that maybe if she slows them down, they’ll leave her behind.

“If you’re not feeling up to it, you say something, alright?” Joel goes on, narrowing his eyes.

Ellie narrows her eyes back at him, trying to come up with a snarky response, but she comes up blank and just nods instead.

There’s no easy route to Jackson, with practically nothing between the two cities but forest and mountains. The past few days have been rough, and walking today feels even worse. Ellie feels more sluggish and foggy the further she walks, and every breath of cold air makes her throat hurt worse. As the day wears on, it starts to feel like one of those dreams she has sometimes where her feet are made of lead and she can barely move no matter how fast she tries to run.

Sam tugs on her sleeve, telling her something about underwater volcanoes, but she doesn’t catch half of what he’s signing because she can’t turn her head fast enough, it hurts her neck too much.

“Cool,” she signs back.

He gives her an annoyed look in return.

“Can you tell me again?” Ellie asks.

He shakes his head, stomping off ahead of her. Ellie stops for a moment to catch her breath and the sudden intake of cold air sends her into a coughing fit that makes her whole body ache. She glances up and Joel and Henry have stopped and turned to look at her, both of their faces clouded with worry.

“You alright?” Joel asks.

“My throat hurts a little, but I’m fine,” Ellie mutters.

“How long’s it been hurting?” he presses.

She shrugs, keeping her eyes fixed on her feet. “Since this morning.”

“We have medicine,” he says, frustrated, or maybe worried, Ellie’s not sure.

She frowns. “I don’t fuckin’ need—”

“That’s what it’s for, Ellie,” Henry says. “We’re a team, right? If there’s something going on with you, you need to let us know.”

Tears suddenly sting at her eyes and she quickly tries to brush them away with her coat sleeve, but they keep spilling, running down her face and dripping down to the collar of her sweatshirt.

“I’m fine,” she repeats, although her voice is too hoarse for it to be believable.

“We picked up some ibuprofen in Cody, it’ll help,” Henry goes on, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We need to stop and have some lunch anyways.”

Ellie shakes her head. “No. I can— I wanna keep going.”

“Let’s get some medicine and some food in your system first, kiddo,” Joel says.

The pills hurt to swallow, and the can of vegetable soup isn’t much better. Ellie passes the can back to Joel after taking a few bites, shaking her head. Joel gives her another worried look, but he doesn’t argue with her.

—

A few days later, Joel frowns up at the heavy gray clouds, squinting to see beyond the swirling snow, the blustering wind making his eyes water. Tess used to tease him about how he complained the dustings of snow they’d get back in Boston, telling him how he wouldn’t have lasted a day through a Michigan winter. He’s pretty sure that even she would have found these prairie snowstorms offensive.

“We need to take cover somewhere, it’s gettin’ worse,” he says to the others.

Ellie nods quickly, which Joel finds disconcerting— she’s usually the first to push to walk a few more miles. She must really be feeling sick. She’s still got a sore throat and she woke up with a fever this morning. The ibuprofen hasn’t seemed to have made much of a difference over the past days, which he hopes is just because it’s past its expiration date and isn’t a sign of whatever it is that she’s caught being something more serious. He hates to keep pushing her to keep going when, in a better world, she’d be resting in bed, watching cartoons, drinking orange juice and eating chicken soup, but with this weather and no real shelter to be found, they can’t afford to stop for too long.

His train of thought is interrupted by Sam tugging on his sleeve. He glances down and the boy is pointing off in the distance, looking up at him with big eyes.

A house. Ramshackle and tiny, maybe more of a shed, but most definitely shelter from the storm. Joel nods, ruffling the kid’s hair and getting a small smile in return. As they move closer towards it, though, Henry suddenly freezes, and Joel quickly sees what’s giving him pause.

There’s smoke billowing out of the chimney.

Henry looks over the kids’ heads at Joel, who shakes his head.

“Small house,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll outnumber ‘em.”

They approach carefully, Henry and Joel each occasionally checking behind themselves. It’s hard to see, but there doesn’t seem to be any movement inside the house. Joel considers saying something to Ellie about having her gun out, too, but he’s not sure if arming a feverish, exhausted kid would be a wise call.

“Who the hell are you?” a gruff voice asks.

His heart pounding in his ears, Joel pivots and hoists up his gun as Henry shoves Sam behind his back, pointing his own gun in the direction of the voice. Ellie fumbles to find her pistol in her coat pocket, nearly toppling over when Joel steps in front of her.

“Easy,” the voice says.

The man comes into view, stepping forward through the blur of falling snow, placing himself between them and the house. He’s older than Joel, carrying a crossbow and wearing a heavy coat and snowshoes, carrying a pair of slaughtered rabbits.

The door to the house opens and a woman is standing there, looking over at them and then at the man, curious, but not particularly concerned.

“Just passing through,” Joel says, raising his hands and nodding at Henry to lower his gun. “Headed to Jackson, looking for my brother.” Joel reaches for his map. “You don’t know where—?”

“You don’t wanna be headed that way,” the woman says, cutting him off.

“Why’s that?” Henry asks.

The couple exchange a look.

“We never seen who’s out there, beyond the river,” the woman says, “but we see the bodies they leave behind. Some infected, some not. If your brother’s west of the river, he’s gone.”

Joel frowns, stifling the way the panic rises in his throat as those words that have been gnawing away inside of him for weeks are spoken aloud by this stranger. He tries to remind himself that the people back in Cody knew Tommy, that they thought he seemed to live in some kind of settlement, but the woman’s words, he’s gone, ring and reverberate in his ears—

“You don’t wanna be out in this kind of weather,” the man goes on. He gestures towards Ellie, whose coat is unzipped and gloves are off. “This one’s walking around like it’s a spring day.”

“Zip up your coat, you’ve already got a cold,” Joel says.

Ellie rolls her eyes, although she still does as he says.

“It’s not even that cold outside,” she mutters, glancing up to make sure that he heard her.

“The kids want something to eat?” the woman asks.

The man—her husband, Joel assumes—gives her a look. “You’re inviting them in or what?”

She shrugs, unconcerned.

“We’re fine,” Joel says before Henry or Ellie can accept the invitation. He can’t help but draw the connection between the timing of Ellie getting sick and the only time they’ve spent with other people on the road. Even well-intentioned strangers pose a risk.

“Well, let me get you something for the road,” the woman says.

The man shakes his head and rolls his eyes, exasperated.

“There’s caves just south of here, if you need somewhere to take shelter,” he says. He gestures to the map in Joel’s hands, pointing out where they are and where the caves are.

The woman comes back with a small bag, which she hands to Henry.

“Jerky, and some apples,” she says.

Henry nods appreciatively. He glances over at Joel, who gives a curt nod, too, trying to block those words out of his mind, but the more he tries, the louder they feel— he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.

They camp out for the night in a cave by the river protected from the wind. The snow, at least, has slowed down for the time being. Ellie’s curled up in a ball in her sleeping bag, already asleep.

Sam’s staring up at the sky, his eyes huge. Joel follows his gaze upwards. Glowing fluorescent waves illuminate the sky. Sarah had watched some show on PBS about the northern lights once when she was just about Sam’s age, he remembers. She talked for days about how they should go to Iceland or Greenland or somewhere to see them someday when she was older.

Sam looks over to Henry for an explanation.

“It’s the northern lights,” Henry signs. He frowns, thinking about how to explain it. “It’s— something to do with magnets.”

“Magnets?” Sam repeats, wrinkling his nose.

Henry nods. He glances over at Ellie, who hasn’t stirred at all.

“She’ll be pissed if we let her sleep through it,” he says to Joel. He reaches over and gently shakes her arm. “Hey, you wanna see the northern lights?”

She startles and blinks, disoriented.

“The northern lights,” Henry repeats, pointing up at the sky.

“Oh, cool,” Ellie says, her voice hoarse, and she turns her head to glance up at the sky for a moment before closing her eyes again and curling back up tighter.

“Must really be sick,” Henry says.

Joel nods, not wanting to say more about it, as if maybe the words alone might make it more true.

Ellie wakes up groggy with a worse fever, and her throat’s hurting so much that she can barely speak.

“Can I take a look at your throat?” Joel says.

She nods, and she leans her head on his arm as he sits down next to her on the ground to dig his flashlight out of his backpack. He’s not sure if she’s too ill to keep herself upright, or if she’s just so comfortable around him now that she doesn’t think anything of leaning on him.

He’s not sure which of those thoughts frightens him more.

“Here, open your mouth,” he says, pulling away and then reaching an arm out to steady her for a moment.

Sure enough, her tonsils are red and swollen, dotted with white spots.

“Looks like strep,” he says, frowning. Untreated, he knows it can turn into scarlet fever, which in turn can become rheumatic fever and damage the kidneys, the heart—

“We need antibiotics for that?” Henry asks.

Joel nods, and Ellie gives him a worried look. Henry takes the map out and traces the route with his finger.

“We’re close enough we could get there today,” he says, his eyes still fixed on the map. “If Viv was right and there is a settlement there, they could have medicine.”

Joel nods slowly. “Or she’s wrong and we’ve made a sick kid walk fifteen miles for nothing.”

“I can do it,” Ellie says, her voice strained.

“I could try and go down there and scope it out and come back,” Henry says, “but if something happens, I don’t want you to be stranded out here with them.”

Sam tugs on his brother’s sleeve, annoyed at being left out of the conversation. Henry waves him off.

Joel looks over at Ellie, who’s pulled her knees up to her chest, staring vacantly ahead. Her lips are chapped and dry, and he realizes with a pang of guilt that he can’t remember the last time he saw her drink any water.

“You need to take a sip of water,” he says, taking her canteen from where it’s attached to her bag at her feet and handing it to her.

“Hurts,” she whispers, gesturing to her throat and shaking her head, curling in on herself a little tighter.

Henry scoops up a handful of snow and molds it into a snowball. He hands it to Ellie, who gives him a quizzical look.

“Take little bites,” he says.

She does, still wincing a bit as she swallows.

“When I was a kid, before the outbreak, my mom would give me popsicles when I was sick,” Henry says. “Sam had a hard time keeping anything down for a while when he was taking the drugs for his cancer, so a couple times I froze ice cubes with some juice from canned fruit in them, helped a little bit.” He gestures to the snowball. “Kind of the same idea.”

Ellie nods, taking another small bite of snow.

“We need to try and get her medicine,” Henry says, looking over at Joel with a quiet determination that makes him seem both much older and much younger than he is.

“I can make it there,” Ellie says again, jutting out her chin.

He sighs, shaking his head in resignation. “You’ll let us know when you need to take a break.”

Ellie nods quickly, and he knows her well enough by now to know that that’s a fib at best.

—

Sam drags his foot along behind himself in the snow, making a long line stretching across the snowy path. Maybe, he thinks, if he’d done that forever, the whole way from Kansas City out here to Wyoming, there would be a line showing their whole journey across all these states.

Henry glances back and sees what Sam’s doing and shakes his head, gesturing for him to catch up. Sam frowns, but he goes back to walking normally anyways, walking a little faster to keep up with everybody else.

He catches up to Ellie and taps her arm. She looks over at him, her eyes heavy-lidded from being sick and tired.

“Captain Ryan,” he signs, “the enemies have infiltrated—”

“I don’t want to play, Sam,” she signs back, shrugging apologetically and holding her mitten up to her mouth as she coughs again.

Sam nods and goes back to trying to remember what happens after the enemies infiltrate the ship, but Ellie’s better at remembering that story, it’s in one of the issues of Savage Starlight that was hers. Even with as many times as they’ve both read it, she read it lots more times than him back when she lived in Boston.

He starts dragging his feet in the snow again for a while, one foot and then the other to make two lines like the railroad tracks they saw back in Nebraska, until he notices that everyone else’s boots are still, they’ve stopped walking, looking off ahead. They’re at the top of a tall hill, and off in the distance, beyond the steep drop-off, there’s a town surrounded tall, wooden walls. Sam glances up and he can tell that Joel and Henry can see what he’s noticed, too— the walls don’t look old and broken the way things usually are in the other towns they’ve seen, and it’s hard to see through the snow, but it looks almost like there might be lights on in the buildings there. Maybe the lady at the airport was right, and people do live there.

Sam elbows Ellie, pointing to the town, and she nods, not excited about it the way she normally would be. He understands. When he got really sick back in Kansas City, he had a hard time feeling excited about things, too. Still, he misses having someone who wants to talk to him. Joel isn’t very good at conversations, and the more worried Henry is, the less he tells Sam, and the past few days, it feels like he’s barely told him anything.

They all continue walking down the path, which is getting harder to see now that it’s started to snow again, so hard that it’s really hard to see anything but a white blur. Sam hates snow. They got some snow in the QZ, but not this much, and they weren’t camping in the QZ. Snow looks fluffy and pretty, but it’s just cold and wet and it makes it hard to walk and easier to trip and fall, and when you do fall, the snow gets in your eyes and your nose, and it hurts.

He looks over to ask Henry how much further they have to walk, but Henry’s not there. Sam freezes. He spins around and Henry’s not behind him, either. Ellie and Joel both have stopped, too, looking off in the same direction, their eyes worried. Sam tugs on Ellie’s sleeve.

“He fell,” Ellie signs, gesturing towards the steep drop-off a few feet away at the edge of the path, where Joel’s already headed.

Sam’s and he starts to rush that way. Joel holds an arm out to stop him, but he pushes past to see, and Joel grabs the hood of his coat so he doesn’t fall, too.

Henry’s at the bottom of the drop-off— alive, sitting up, looking up at them, holding his arm close to his chest, his face all scrunched up. He’s talking to Joel and gesturing to a large rock not too far from him where he must have hit his arm. Joel glances back at Sam and Ellie, holding his hand up in a signal for them to stay put, then gets down on the ground and lays down on his stomach, reaching an arm down to help Henry back up, shouting something at him. One-handed, Henry moves a log so he can stand on it to reach Joel’s hand, and he grimaces as he makes it back up.

He sits down, breathing heavily, and Sam quickly sits down next to him. Henry instinctively moves to put an arm around him, then freezes, wincing in pain.

“Did you break it?” Sam asks.

Henry nods. He starts to take his coat off so he can see his arm better, then quickly hunches over and throws up.

Joel looks around and gestures for them to follow him. They make it to the base of a large tree a little ways off, where, sitting down, they’re at least partially protected from the wind and snow. Sam frowns as he looks at the others.

Ellie’s eyes are drooping like she might fall asleep, and Henry looks like he might pass out, and Joel’s face has gone all pale and lost, he’s breathing weird, holding his hand to his chest, the same way he did when he freaked out that time Ellie and Sam wandered off at the sporting goods store back in Nebraska.

Sam takes a breath— in for four seconds, hold for two, out for six, something Ellie showed him once that’s supposed to make you feel more calm. It doesn’t really feel like it’s working now.

Joel and Henry both have told him lots of times what to do if he gets separated from the group— stay put, stay quiet, check your six, don’t fall asleep. If he sees infected or people or something else bad, stay out of sight, be quick, find shelter, but don’t go too far.

Sam knows lots of things, he’s not stupid, but they’ve never told him what to do if everybody else is still here, but too hurt or sick or scared to do anything.

He digs his gun out of his bag, holding it out in front of himself with two hands, and gets up to stand in front of the rest of them. He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember what Daniella Star says when they’re almost about to get sent into the Obsidian Vortex— “Hope is our most powerful weapon. As long as we hold onto it, our enemies will never truly win.” He remembers, though, that he shouldn’t have his eyes closed if he’s keeping watch, and he opens his eyes and wipes at his face, which is wet with tears, uncomfortably cold in the wind.

Maybe, he thinks, they’ll all freeze in the snow and in hundreds of years people will find them, like the people in Pompeii.

All of a sudden, before Sam can see what’s happening, Joel stands back up and grabs Sam’s arm and pushes him behind his back, still holding his arm tight with one hand. Sam screws his eyes shut, pressing his face into the back of Joel’s coat. There’s a strange vibration in the ground, almost like thunder, but it keeps going and going and getting stronger until he finally opens his eyes and peeks out from behind Joel, and he can feel his eyes go wide at the sight before him.

Horses.

Chapter Text

An Emmylou Harris Christmas album plays on the stereo and a fire crackles in the fireplace as the snowstorm blusters outside the window. Tommy walks into the living room from the kitchen, a mug of herbal tea for Maria in one hand and chicory root tea for himself in the other.

“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Miller,” he says, handing her mug to her and clinking his mug against hers.

Maria shakes her head, looking at him from the sides of her eyes, one corner of her mouth pulling up in a small smile. “You’re such a cornball.”

The weekend has been busy with all of the holiday festivities in town, and this evening is probably the only time the two of them will get alone. They’ve got a little tree set up in the corner of the room, decorated with dried apple slices and pinecones, like something out of one of those frontier times books Sarah was enamored with for a while.

“You alright?” Maria says, leaning against him.

Tommy nods, gesturing towards the chalkboard memorial on the mantle. “She would’ve liked all this. Loved Christmas.”

She hums, understanding. “Kevin, too.”

They sit in comfortable silence for a moment, the soft country music playing in the background.

“This time next year,” Tommy says, gently placing a hand on her stomach, “this little guy’ll be, what, about seven months old? Gotta start stocking up on presents.”

There’s a quick rap at the door. Might be a neighbor with some Christmas cookies, but more likely someone coming to talk to Maria about one town council matter or another that really does not need to be discussed on Christmas Eve.

Tommy groans. “If this is about that fucking greenhouse rotation schedule again—”

Maria elbows him, almost concealing her smirk. “Be nice.”

“I am nice!” he protests as she gets up and heads over to the door.

“Hey, Kendra,” she says from the foyer. “Merry Christmas. Is everything alright?”

He braces himself involuntarily. Kendra is their neighbor down the road, a really sweet younger woman who’s the assistant blacksmith in town. But with her corkscrew curls and light brown skin, she bears a striking resemblance to his niece, a constant reminder of the adult Sarah never got to grow up to be, because Tommy was too late to save her. Kendra’s just about the same age as Sarah would be now, in her thirties, grown up and married with a little girl of her own.

He’s so lost in thought that he doesn’t tune into what she’s saying until he hears his name.

“—looking for Tommy,” Kendra’s saying. “Says he’s his brother.”

“Did he give a name?” Maria asks.

“Joel.”

She says it plainly, not in the hushed tones Tommy’s used when he’s told Maria about his past, or the fiery way he’d spoken it the night before he left Boston— I never want to see your goddamn face again, Joel—

“Tommy?” Maria calls, although he’s already on his feet.

“What happened?” Tommy asks, putting an arm around Maria’s shoulders when he gets to the doorway. Maria’s body tenses, but she doesn’t move away from him.

“The patrollers who were heading back from the river when the storm started ran into a man who says he’s your brother Joel,” Kendra says, glancing between the two of them. “They’re headed to the gates now. He’s with a group, another man and a little boy and girl.”

“He doesn’t have more children,” Maria says, glancing up at Tommy for confirmation.

He shakes his head. They both quickly get on their boots and leave to follow Kendra to the gate. The snow is blustering around, white flecks landing on Maria’s dark locs.

“Why does he know that you’re here?” she asks under her breath, her words careful and measured, her eyes narrowed.

“I did radio him from the tower in Cody a couple times, just letting him know I was alright,” Tommy admits, quickly adding, “but that’s nowhere near here, and I never told him where we were located. Maria—”

“It is what it is,” she says. “We can talk about it later. Tommy, could it be some sort of trap—?”

“No,” he says firmly.

Joel’s done a lot of horrible things, the same as Tommy has, but he wouldn’t come all the way out here for that.

It’s hard to see more than a few yards ahead in the snow, but he can make out a group of three people passing by them as they make their way towards the walls— one of the patrol trainees, Jesse, and one of Maria’s good friends, Astrid, who works in the clinic, and a young man Tommy doesn’t recognize, who’s clutching his arm to his chest and grimacing in pain, his eyes screwed shut.

“Everything alright?” Maria asks.

Astrid nods, forging ahead, keeping one hand on the young man’s back, leading him down the road. “We’re taking him to the clinic, he fell and broke his arm. The man he’s traveling with says he knows Tommy, right, Jesse?”

Jesse nods, his shaggy hair flopping in front of his eyes. “Says he’s your brother.”

And sure enough, as they approach the gates— right there, talking to Eugene, surrounded by a small crowd that’s gathered, is Joel.

He looks different than he had in Boston, his hair’s grown out, grayer than it had been the last time Tommy saw him, and he certainly looks haggard after what had to have been months on the road if he came here on foot. But there’s also something about him Tommy can’t quite place that seems lighter.

One obvious difference is that there’s two children with him. All three of them are huddled together against the wind. There’s a little boy with short dark braids peeking out from under his cap who’s clinging to Joel’s coat, and there’s a girl standing right behind them, who’s staring off into the distance, blinking tiredly. Joel’s nodding at something Eugene’s saying.

The boy is crying, pointing off towards where they’d seen the group walking off a moment ago. Joel puts a hand on his back, but the boy stamps his foot, crossing his arms across his chest and crying harder. Ruby, one of the schoolteachers, goes to try and help, but when she steps closer and gently touches the little boy’s arm, introducing herself, he startles, eyes wide, and shakes his head, clinging tighter to Joel.

“He’s worried about his brother— he broke his arm, they’re taking him to the clinic,” Joel explains to Ruby, and Tommy’s surprised by how good it feels to hear his brother’s voice, how his throat tightens a little at the familiarness of it.

Joel rubs the boy’s shoulder to get his attention and makes a series of hand signals— sign language, Tommy realizes. Whatever he tells the boy seems to calm him down, he nods and hides his face in Joel’s coat. Joel pats his back, a little awkwardly, but a far cry from the man Tommy knew in Boston who would go out of his way to avoid crossing paths with a child.

Maria slips her hand into Tommy’s, giving him a curious look when he glances over at her, and he realizes that he’s been staring in stunned silence for probably close to a minute now.

“Joel,” he calls, raising his hand in a greeting.

Joel looks up, his eyes wide, relief spreading over his face. “Tommy.”

Tommy rushes over, closing the space between them, and wraps his arms around his brother in a tight hug. Joel hugs him back one-armed, still keeping his other hand on the little boy’s shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Tommy says, feeling a laugh escape his chest.

Joel shakes his head incredulously, looking Tommy up and down. “Came out here to rescue you.”

Tommy gestures to the kids, who both move closer to Joel at the attention. “Who do we have here?”

“This is Ellie and Sam. It’s— a long story. Do y’all have medicine?” There’s a frantic edge creeping into Joel’s voice. He gestures to the girl. Tommy hadn’t noticed before, but her cheeks are flushed and there’s a blotchy rash on her neck and she’s barely able to keep her eyes open. “She’s been sick a while now, her fever ain’t gone down— strep or something, I think she needs antibiotics.”

“Our doctor can check her out,” Maria says, stepping forward. “We’ll need you to quarantine, we have to be pretty cautious about disease here. There’s a house across the street from ours where you can stay— you checked them for infection?”

Eugene nods. “Buckley didn’t smell anything on them.”

“It’s out this way,” Tommy says, gesturing in the general direction of their street.

Joel nods and signals to the little boy, Sam, that they’re moving, and he nods in understanding, but the girl, Ellie, doesn’t move to follow them, looking ahead with half-closed eyes but not seeming to really be seeing anything. Joel gently nudges her with his elbow, his brow furrowed with worry, and it’s so much like the old Joel, the real Joel that Tommy was sure died with Sarah in that field twenty years ago, that Tommy finds himself staring again.

“C’mon,” Joel says with a gentleness that Tommy hasn’t heard since they left Texas twenty years ago. “Let’s go. We’re almost there, we’ll get you out of the cold, alright?”

She nods, sniffling and shifting her backpack up on her shoulders and following him. Joel looks over to Tommy, gesturing for him to lead the way, which he does.

“How many people live here?” Joel asks, glancing around as they make their way through downtown and to the greenhouses, then over to the residential streets.

“About three hundred,” Maria says.

Usually, with newcomers in town, she would go into her whole spiel about Jackson— Tommy teases her sometimes about how she missed her calling as a tour guide, but with this blizzard rolling in, it seems more imperative to just get inside.

They turn the corner onto Rancher Street and walk up to the blue house across the street from their own.

“That’s our place, over there,” Tommy says, gesturing towards their house, having to raise his voice a bit to speak over the wind.

Joel glances over at the house, then from Maria to Tommy, raising his eyebrows and nodding once, unsmiling— a response much more in line with the Joel Tommy left in Boston.

“This place has been pretty much untouched since ’03,” Tommy goes on, opening the door. “We’ll get the heat up and running, but for now we can get a fire going in the fireplace.”

Maria puts up her bandana as a makeshift mask as they walk inside, and Tommy does the same. It’s been a while since they’ve had any major illnesses sweep through town, and they certainly don’t want to be the ones to spread any new germs around.

The kids stick right behind Joel as they walk up to the doorway, looking around with wide, wary eyes.

“This place been cleared?” Joel asks, holding out an arm to keep them from walking ahead of him, the snow blowing into the house from behind them.

Tommy nods. “The whole town’s clear, Joel.”

Joel nods, and the kids follow him inside. Joel still scans the living room before stepping through the doorway. He nods at the kids once he’s sure it’s safe, and the two of them sit down side by side on the sofa, not taking off their coats or boots or backpacks. Ellie puts an arm around Sam, resting her chin on top of his head.

There’s a stack of firewood by the fireplace and a tinderbox on the mantle, and Tommy goes over to start a fire, it is pretty cold in the house. Once he does that, he figures, he can start working on getting the HVAC system back in order. He’s fixed up quite a few of the houses here, it shouldn’t take long.

“Pretty lucky timing, y’all wouldn’t have wanted to get caught in that blizzard,” he says, kneeling in front of the hearth. “Pretty scary out there.”

Joel hums in agreement. Tommy gets the fire going and the kids both move to sit in front of it. Ellie takes off her backpack and opens it, pulling out a comic book and handing it to Sam.

“Was it just you four traveling together?” Maria asks Joel as he sits down on the sofa.

“Yes, ma’am,” Joel says, keeping his eyes fixed on the kids.

“They all came from the Boston QZ, too?” she goes on.

Tommy cringes. Whether it’s intentional or not, she’s using her lawyer voice, which he knows Joel won’t take kindly to.

Joel sighs, glancing over at her. “Ellie did, she’s got people somewhere out this way we’re tryin’ to find. I promised someone I’d look after her.”

Tommy frowns, trying to imagine a scenario where someone would leave a kid in the care of the brother he left behind in Boston, or a scenario where his brother would agree to that, especially looking after a little girl who must be just about the same age Sarah was. It’s strange, too, that Tess wouldn’t have come with him. He glances over at Maria, who’s leaning on the arm of the sofa, her eyes slightly narrowed, trying to make sense of it, too.

“I was headed this way to check on Tommy anyway,” Joel goes on, shooting a look at Tommy. “We ran into Sam and his brother Henry on our way west—”

He’s interrupted by Ellie having a coughing fit. She doubles over, unable to catch her breath. The coughs suddenly turn to gags, and she throws up, getting vomit all over her jacket. She makes a small whining sound, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“You’re alright,” Joel says, quickly getting off the couch and crouching down beside her, gently putting a hand on her back.

He unzips her jacket and helps her out of it, not seeming fazed at all by the vomit. He holds the jacket by the hood, continuing to console her as he gets up and guides her back over to the couch. Sam scrambles to his feet, grabbing the comic book, and follows them, sticking close to Joel’s side, narrowly avoiding contact with the jacket.

“Here, there’s a laundry room in the back, I can put her coat in the hamper,” Maria says, getting up and taking it from Joel.

He barely seems to register it, focused on helping her take off her hat and gloves. It’s strikingly similar to when he’d help Sarah as a toddler, patient and gentle. Ellie starts crying harder when he takes off her hat.

“I’m cold,” she sobs, her voice scratchy and strained.

“I know,” Joel says sympathetically, “but you’ve got a fever and you’re gonna overheat with all these layers on. We’re inside, kiddo, you’ll be okay.”

Ellie curls up on her side on the sofa, sniffling, and Joel goes to help Sam out of his outdoor gear, too. Under his coat, Sam’s wearing a red Lion King sweatshirt with a picture of Simba printed underneath the title of the movie.

“That’s a good movie,” Tommy says, pointing to the picture and giving the boy a thumbs up.

Sam frowns at him, scooting closer to Joel.

“He’s deaf,” Joel says, a little exasperated, a tone Tommy’s been familiar with all his life.

Tommy shakes his head. “No, I figured that—”

“Here,” Joel says, taking Sam’s little backpack and pulling out a message board slate, a faded picture of Woody Woodpecker printed on its cardboard frame. He reaches back into the bag and pulls out a small Yoda action figure, a small piece of duct tape holding its lightsaber to its hand. He presses it into Sam’s hand and writes, Tommy likes the lion on your shirt, it’s from a movie.

Sam glances back over at Tommy, giving him an unimpressed look almost identical to the one on Joel’s face.

“We’ve probably got it in the library here if he wants to see it,” Tommy says.

“The library,” Joel repeats, raising an eyebrow.

Ellie starts coughing again and Joel reaches for her backpack, frowning when he pulls out a canteen and finds it empty.

“Shit,” he mutters. He glances up at Tommy. “Y’all got drinking water around somewhere nearby, too, or just a video library?”

Maria returns just then with a large bowl and a couple of dusty dish towels, and a glass of water from the sink in the kitchen at the back of the house. Joel looks at the glass a little incredulously as she hands it to Ellie, who sits up and takes the glass from her, absently holding it in both her hands for a moment before taking a sip.

“Don’t reckon I’ve seen running water anywhere outside a QZ,” Joel says. “It’s safe to drink?”

Maria nods, perhaps a little more curtly than she normally would with other newcomers, and hands Joel the bowl and the towels. “We’ve got a good filtration system.”

Ellie takes another sip of water, wincing as she swallows and wiping at her mouth with the back of her sweatshirt sleeve. Maria softly puts a hand to Ellie’s forehead and frowns, concerned.

“Tommy and I can go see if someone from the clinic can come right over,” she says. “There’s a Christmas Eve dinner in the dining hall. We’ll let you get settled and bring you back something to eat.”

Joel lets out a low whistle. “Christmas dinner. This sure is something.” He frowns, looking over at Tommy. “If you’re going to the clinic, can you find out how Henry’s doing?”

“Of course,” Tommy says.

Ellie starts to dry-heave again, and Joel sets the bowl on her lap and gently holds her hair back. He’s talking to her in a quiet, steady, comforting voice. Tommy can’t quite make out the words Joel’s saying as he and Maria make their way to the door, but the tone is familiar, a comfort that he’d pushed from his mind for decades now— Joel consoling him as they sat on the floor of the tiny bathroom in their family’s trailer when he got a bad bout of food poisoning once when they were little kids, Joel patiently comforting Sarah all through the night when she was a colicky newborn and would only fall asleep in his arms. 

“It’s like seeing a ghost,” he tells Maria as soon as they’re outside. “The way he talks to those kids—”

She nods. “He does certainly seem— different from how you described him. It’s a pretty strange situation.”

He nods, his eyes wide. “Very.”

Maria’s quiet for a moment, then glances up at him, her eyes piercing and worried. “Do you think the kids are okay to be staying alone with him?”

“He wouldn’t hurt a child,” Tommy insists. Still, the brother he left in Boston isn’t exactly who he’d choose to be anyone’s babysitter.

“Maybe you should stay with them, while they’re quarantining,” Maria says slowly, thinking it through. “We’ll get someone to cover your patrol shift on Tuesday, and with this blizzard rolling in, it’ll be too snowy out for the construction crew the next few days. We could ask someone else, but—”

Tommy shakes his head. “No, I’d like to. I don’t want you to have to be alone on Christmas, though.”

She shakes her head dismissively. “We can have our Christmas after the holidays, we’ll have more time then, anyways. I’d stay, too, but—”

“We don’t wanna risk you getting sick,” he says.

Maria nods, reaching over to squeeze his hand before she splits off to head to the clinic, and Tommy walks ahead to the town dining hall. It’s bustling inside, the delicious aroma of roasted pheasant and turkey fill the air, kids are laughing and darting back and forth between tables, and a Christmas song is playing on the boombox— Last Christmas. Tommy stifles a groan. Twenty years since the world ended and that fucking Wham song is still around.

He goes to grab a couple of the Tupperware containers set aside for folks who are celebrating at home, and he fills one up with poultry and mashed potatoes, and another with pumpkin pie and bread, remembering that when Sarah was little, she’d always fill up on pie and bread rolls at their holiday dinners. He grabs one more container to fill with chicken soup for Ellie.

Two of the neighbor kids, Dina and Jesse, are watching him with big eyes from the table where they’re sitting with Jesse’s mom, Robin. Jesse looks away shyly when Tommy makes eye contact with him, but Dina waves him over. Tommy balances his food containers on top of one another and walks their way.

“Merry Christmas,” he says. “Jim and Talia are both workin’?”

Robin’s husband is the town doctor, and Dina’s older sister has been apprenticing in the clinic for the past year, but typically the clinic would be closed for a holiday dinner, barring an emergency.

Robin nods. “Busy night at the clinic, Jim radioed home and said they had a newcomer with a bad broken arm.”

“Is the other man who came today really your brother?” Dina asks, her eyes narrowed.

Tommy nods, and Jesse gives Dina an I told you so look.

“He came all the way here from Texas?” Jesse asks, his curiosity getting the better of him.

“Boston,” Tommy says.

“Jesse said he had kids with him,” Dina says, leaning forward with her elbows on the table.

Tommy nods. “He’s looking after them. There’s a girl about your age, her name’s Ellie.”

Dina grins. “Cool.”

Tommy leaves the dining hall with his to-go containers in hand and finds Maria, who’s walking his direction from the clinic, carrying a large canvas bag.

“They’re just about done setting Henry’s arm, Jim’ll head over to the house to check on Ellie as soon as he’s done,” she says as she steps closer to him.

“Is he doing alright?”

Maria nods. “Talia said it was a pretty bad break, the bone broke through his skin, but in the scheme of things, though, he was lucky it was his arm that made impact when he fell, not his head or his spine. They’re keeping him overnight to monitor him, but he should be good to come home within the next day or two. Apparently he’s been very insistent that Jim gets over there to check on Ellie.” She hands the bag over to Tommy. “There’s some ibuprofen in here, and I’ll pick up some more stuff for them at the trading post tomorrow, but there’s some pajamas and a couple of those stuffed animals Caroline made for the Christmas market.” She shrugs, a little sheepish at the sentimentality of it. “I know Christmas doesn’t really mean much to kids now, but I guess it makes me feel a little better to think of them having a present to open on Christmas morning.”

Tommy smiles. They’re two sides of the same coin. Even if she’s more skeptical than him, less apt to be a joiner, as Joel would call it, they both jump at any chance they get to help people.

“I need to go check in with Eugene about the last couple of patrol groups we’re waiting on,” she says. “Please radio me there if there’s anything going on I should know about.”

She looks up at him, searching his face for some sort of confirmation.

“I will,” Tommy says, leaning in and pressing a kiss to her forehead.

Maria nods as he pulls away, but he’s not sure if she believes him. He set off towards home, flipping up the collar of his jacket and bracing himself against the wind and snow. It’s gotten so cold out that he can feel the frigid air freezing the hairs inside his nostrils each time he inhales.

The lights are on downstairs at the blue house, glowing a warm yellow in the cold darkness of the winter evening. He opens the door and finds the three of them all just about where he left them in the living room— all sound asleep.

Ellie’s curled up on one end of the couch with a throw pillow under her head and a colorful crocheted afghan draped over her. Sam’s on the other end of the couch, still sitting up, his mouth half-open, the comic book in his lap, his hand still holding the corner of a page as if he fell asleep in the middle of turning the page. His head is lolled over and resting on Joel’s arm. Joel’s out cold, too, sitting between the kids, his head tipped back against the back of the couch, one hand on Ellie’s foot.

Tommy takes a step closer, and sees that Sam’s Yoda figurine has fallen to the ground. He stoops to pick it up and sets the toy next to Sam on the couch. Joel stirs at the movement, but he doesn’t wake up. Tommy smiles, shaking his head a little at the strangeness and the familiarness of it all, and he heads off to the kitchen to get plates for their Christmas dinner.

Chapter Text

Ellie jolts awake and blinks, taking in her unfamiliar surroundings. She’s in a dimly lit room in a bed that’s soft and warm, and it would be really comfortable if she knew where the fuck she was. She’s surrounded by pink striped wallpaper with posters on the wall. It hurts to move her head, but she can tell there’s no one else in the room.

Panic rises in her throat.

She’s alone and she doesn’t know where she is.

“Joel?” she calls, but raising her voice makes the dull ache of her sore throat instantly turn into sharp, shooting pain. She puts a hand to her throat and a small part of her wonders if maybe it’s finally happening, if she’s finally turning, if it’s the tendrils of cordyceps in her throat choking her and making it feel like she’s swallowing shards of glass. That would fucking track, they finally find Joel’s brother and it’s too late for her to get to the Fireflies.

“I’ll be right there,” Joel’s voice calls from somewhere far away, and she can feel relief wash over her.

She waits for what feels like a long time, her brain buzzing inside of her skull, and then the door opens and Joel steps in, his brow furrowed.

“You alright?” he asks.

She shakes her head. He steps closer and presses a hand to her forehead. His hands feel cold.

“Jesus,” he mutters, which she’s not sure if she’s supposed to hear. “The doctor just radioed Tommy, he’ll be on his way over here soon.”

“Where—?” she starts, wincing again at how much it hurts to talk. “This is— that house?”

He nods, frowning. “Yeah. Tommy got the heat working and we got you upstairs so you can rest. You remember coming up here?”

She nods, although she doesn’t remember that at all. Trying to remember the past few hours feels like trying to read one of the old water-stained books in the school library that was missing half its pages. They were in the woods, and then they were on horses, and they were inside by the fireplace and she was throwing up, and now she’s here.

“Where were you?” she asks him.

He sits down in a desk chair a few feet away from her. “Just downstairs.”

“Where’s Sam?” she asks.

“He’s downstairs, too, with Tommy, eating supper,” he says. “Are you hungry, you want something to eat?”

She shakes her head. Just the thought of eating makes her feel sick.

“Am I turning?” she whispers.

Joel shakes his head, his face suddenly stern, leaning in towards her with his elbows on his knees. “Ellie, you can’t talk about that, alright? I know you ain’t feelin’ well, but you gotta remember, you don’t tell nobody about your bite.”

“I’m not turning, though,” she repeats, looking at him for confirmation.

“No, of course you’re not,” he agrees. “You got a fever, that’s all.”

She nods, feeling reassured, and settles her head back on the pillow, feeling her eyes drifting closed. Joel says something else to her, but she’s too tired to listen.

The last time she was sick like this, really sick with a fever and everything, was the winter she moved up to the military school dorms from the orphanage. The flu hit the whole QZ hard and pretty much all of the kids got sick. They cancelled school for a week and made everyone quarantine in their rooms. The smell of the incineration piles outside permeated the air for weeks afterwards.

She and Riley hadn’t known each other for very long then, they weren’t really friends yet. Ellie got sick first, stuck in bed with a bad fever and a barking cough, barely able to even sit up, and she expected Riley to keep her distance and sequester herself to her side of the room. Every time illnesses had gone around at the orphanage when she was younger, the teachers there made a point of making sure everyone, grownups and kids, had as little contact as possible with the sick kids.

But instead, Riley kept checking on Ellie, putting her hand to Ellie’s forehead and asking her how she felt, and she made sure that they got water and food from the dorm monitors. She’d reminded Ellie to drink water, holding the cup up to her mouth the day that Ellie was shaking so much that she couldn’t hold the cup without spilling it.

One night, when Ellie’s fever was really bad and she kept having weird nightmares and her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, Riley put a cold wet washrag on her forehead and sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair until she fell asleep. It’s not something they ever talked about, neither of them wanting to admit to that kind of softness, but it’s kind of nice to think about right now.

Ellie pulls the blanket tighter around herself now and hides her face in the soft fabric of the pillow. It’s been days since she last thought about Riley. Maybe weeks.

It hurts her feverish head to think about anything, but she makes herself dredge up the list of everything she remembers about Riley, because if she forgets anything about her, it’ll be like killing her all over again.

Her favorite color was teal. She collected bottle caps and trading cards, and her favorite meal in the cafeteria was cheese sandwiches. Her handwriting was nicer than Ellie’s, neat and loopy and kind of girly, which you wouldn’t expect, but that’s what it was. Her favorite Savage Starlight character was CBB-73, the robot. If there was no outbreak and she could do anything she wanted, she would be a scientist, a marine biologist traveling to beaches around the world learning about sharks. More realistically, before she went off and joined the fucking Fireflies, she’d wanted to be a FEDRA medic, but you have to get really good grades in class for that, and even though Riley was smart, she got in trouble for picking fights and talking back too much to get good grades.

Riley had a family once. Her mom’s name was Erika and her dad’s name was Anthony. Riley didn’t talk about them much, but Ellie could tell that they had been kind from the way that Riley was kind. Riley’d had a grandma, too, her dad’s mom, who died when she was little, but Ellie can’t remember if Riley ever told her what her name was.

She can’t remember a lot of things.

She can’t remember if Riley was right-handed or left-handed, or what her favorite book was. She can’t remember what her laugh sounded like. She can’t remember her eyes.

She thinks they were brown, but she can’t remember if they were a light brown or dark, what shape they were, what they looked like when she smiled. She can only picture Riley’s eyes infected in the moments between when Ellie realized Riley was gone and when she shot her, clouded and wild and angry— not the way the real Riley got angry, indignant but collected on the surface, thinking three steps ahead about how to make whichever unlucky motherfucker pissed her off pay— but angry the way a wounded animal would be.

“Hey,” Joel’s voice says, and his hand is on her forehead again. Ellie opens her eyes. He’s worried, his face is all scrunched up, and she absently wonders why. “Is it your throat botherin’ you?”

Her face is wet, she realizes. She’s been crying. She wipes at it with the blanket, making herself sit up, although it makes her vision spotty and her heart pound even harder in her chest, which makes her wonder if she’s going to puke again. There’s a nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she’s forgetting—

Sam.

She has to look out for Sam. She keeps forgetting.

“Where’s Sam?” she asks, her words coming out in a hoarse whisper.

Joel shakes his head and sits down on the edge of the bed. “He’s still downstairs with Tommy, he’s alright. We’re safe here.”

She glances out the window. It’s darker outside than it was before. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have.

“Where’s Henry?” she asks, feeling more tears starting to spill down her cheeks.

“He’s at the clinic,” Joel says. “They were fixing up his arm. He’s doin’ good now, he should be able to come home in the morning. The doctor’s here.”

He nods towards the doorway, where a tall man is standing. Ellie frowns, scooting closer to Joel.

“Hey, Ellie,” the man says, stepping into the room. “I’m Jim, I’m the doctor here. Henry’s arm is all set, he’s okay. He was real worried about you, wanted to make sure I came out here to check on you. He said she’s been sick for about two weeks now?”

This is directed at Joel, who nods. “I’d reckon so, although the days all run together. We stayed overnight in the settlement up in Cody, first time we’ve been around other people in months, and I think she picked something up there, she came down with a sore throat and a fever a little while after that, it’s been gettin’ worse. We gave her some ibuprofen, but it hasn’t seemed to help.”

The doctor takes her temperature and looks in her throat and her ears and he looks at the rash on her neck. She holds her arm close to her body, even though the bite’s still hidden under her long-sleeved shirt and the bandage under that, which Joel had quickly wrapped around her arm while Tommy went out to get their dinner, but the doctor doesn’t go to check it. He agrees with what Joel had said before, that she’s got strep throat that’s turned into scarlet fever, which she thinks sounds like something out of an old-timey book.

“We’ll keep an eye on her, but luckily it doesn’t seem like it’s progressed to rheumatic fever,” the doctor says. “Shouldn’t be any lasting damage, although it may still take her a while to recover.”

He takes two small, chipped plastic bottles out from his bag, painkillers for the fever and antibiotics for the strep, he explains.

“It’s good timing, all things considered,” he tells Joel. “We just got a new batch of antibiotics in from the traders we work with. FEDRA stuff, it’s safe, pretty fresh.”

Joel takes the pill bottles from him and takes one of the pills out, examining it closely before handing it to Ellie along with a glass of water that was sitting on the little table next to the bed. She winces at the pain in her throat as she swallows one pill, then another. The doctor says some more shit about when to take the different pills and other stuff that Ellie’s supposed to do. Her brain and her ears feel like they’re filled with cotton, she knows she won’t remember any of it. She glances up at Joel again, and he’s listening and nodding. He’ll tell her what to do.

“Radio for me if her fever spikes,” the doctor says, starting to pack up his bag. “Otherwise, I’ll plan on stopping by in the morning to check on her.”

“Thank you,” Joel says. “We, uh— we don’t have much to trade for all this—”

He shakes his head. “We wouldn’t expect anything in return. I don’t know you, but I know Tommy, and I know he’d do the same for my family.”

“Reckon he would,” Joel says quietly.

Ellie leans over and rests her head on his arm, feeling too tired to sit up on her own anymore. The word the doctor had used thunks around in her head as she starts to drift off again.

Family.

—

Sam sits in the soft chair closest to the fire, clutching his Yoda figurine in one fist, keeping his eyes fixed on the staircase. The doctor went up there to check on Ellie a really long time ago, it seems like.

Tommy gently taps his shoulder, smiling apologetically when Sam startles. He holds up Sam’s slate, where he’s written, Ellie will be OK.

Sam nods, turning back to watch the stairs again, although from the corner of his eye he can see Tommy sitting down on the couch across from him and writing more. Sam rolls his eyes. All night, Tommy’s been trying to ask him stupid stuff. He knows that he’s trying to be nice and distract him from being scared, but it just makes him feel more scared.

You know how to play tic-tac-toe? he’s written now, with a tic-tac-toe grid drawn underneath his words.

Sam frowns, getting up and snatching the slate away from him, lifting up the plastic sheet to erase Tommy’s message before going back to his chair, stashing the slate behind himself and curling up into a little ball, turning away from Tommy. Sam does know how to play tic-tac-toe, he and Ellie have played it probably a million times over the past months, but he doesn’t want to play it with Joel’s stupid brother who smiles too much and takes his slate without asking and asks too many silly questions and is a stranger. Sam’s not allowed to talk to strangers. Henry’s told him that lots of times, and Joel has, too, but now Joel’s left him alone with one, and Henry’s not here, and even if Tommy isn’t a stranger to Joel, he is a stranger to Sam.

He quickly shoots a glance back over Tommy with narrowed eyes, and Tommy gives him another smile, although this one is kind of sad. Tommy looks over to the stairs, where the doctor is finally coming back down. He gets up to go talk to him, both of their faces clouded with concern, and Sam watches their lips, trying to make out the words, but he’s too tired to follow any of what they’re saying other than the words he’d expect, like Ellie and medicine and fever. Joel told him earlier that the doctor was bringing medicine for Ellie and that he fixed Henry’s arm and that Henry’s okay but he has to stay at the clinic tonight, and Sam doesn’t know what a clinic is, but he knows that it means Henry’s not here.

The doctor catches him staring and waves at him, giving him a kind smile before heading out the door, and Sam waves back in spite of himself before hiding his face in the back of the chair again. He doesn’t know what type of QZ this is, but he hopes this doctor doesn’t get in trouble for helping them like Dr. Edelstein back home in Kansas City did.

There’s a hand on his shoulder and Sam flinches away, reaching behind himself to get his slate to tell Tommy to go away, when he peeks over to see Joel kneeling down in front of him, looking at him with a worried frown.

“What’s the matter?” Joel signs.

Sam shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut and wrapping his arms tight around Joel’s neck, still holding his slate in one hand and his Yoda in the other, burying his face in the soft flannel of Joel’s shirt. Joel is still for a moment, then he wraps his arms around Sam in a hug, cupping the back of his head with his hand. Sam takes a shaky breath and wipes the tears from his face onto Joel’s shirt before pulling away.

“Is Ellie okay?” he signs.

Joel nods. He stands back up and turns to talk to Tommy, and Sam stands up, too, slipping his hand into Joel’s and taking a step behind him. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine his Pompeii book in his mind, which usually helps him to feel better, but all he can think about is Henry disappearing into the blizzard when he left to go get his broken arm fixed, and Ellie coughing and throwing up and acting weird and crying.

Joel squeezes his hand to get his attention.

“Time for bed,” he signs.

Sam shakes his head. “I want to wait for Henry.”

Joel nods, frowning for a moment the way he does when he’s trying to remember a sign, then moves his thumb by his ear. “Tomorrow.”

Sam stamps his foot, feeling hot tears welling up in his eyes. But Joel turns to head upstairs, and Sam rushes to keep up with his long strides, not wanting to have to stay with stupid Tommy again. At the top of the stairs, Joel freezes, frowning at the closed door in front of them. Sam instinctively moves behind him. Joel holds up a finger, signaling for Sam to wait, and he opens the door. Sam stays put, but he peeks through the open doorway.

Ellie’s sitting up in bed, still crying. She stops when she sees Joel, saying something to him. Joel shakes his head and turns to Sam and beckons for him to come into the room. Sam does, and he realizes from the way that Ellie seems to calm down when she sees him that she was worried about him.

“See, he’s okay,” he can see Joel saying.

Sam steps closer to Ellie, but Joel gently grabs him by the back of his sweatshirt and shakes his head, gesturing for Sam to hand him his slate.

Ellie’s still contagious, you could get sick, he writes. Wait.

Joel kneels down by the bed and pulls another, smaller bed out from underneath the bed Ellie’s, kind of like a magic trick. Sam and Ellie both watch as he pushes it over to the other side of the room, then he gestures for Sam to go there.

“Weird,” Ellie signs, and Sam nods in agreement, but he walks over and sits down on the little bed anyways.

Why was there an extra bed under there? Sam writes on his slate, handing it to Joel, who’s still kneeling on the floor.

It’s called a trundle bed, it’s, Joel pauses, trying to think of how to explain it, then keeps writing, for having slumber parties and such.

Sam isn’t sure what a slumber party is, but he hasn’t slept on a real bed in so long and he’s so tired that he doesn’t feel like asking any more questions.

Joel stands up and hands the slate back to him, a new message written on it this time. You should probably sleep in the other room so you don’t get sick, but I figured you wouldn’t go for that.

Sam nods, curling up into a tight little ball on the mattress and closing his eyes, setting his slate down on the floor and his Yoda down on the bed right next to his face. He can feel the thump of Joel’s boots walking away, and then a moment later he comes back, setting something down on the bed.

Sam opens one eye and sees the pillow that Joel set down. As he scoots up to lay his head on it, Joel puts a blanket over him— not a blanket, Sam realizes, feeling the silky fabric and smelling the familiar scent of campfire and dirt and home. Henry’s sleeping bag.

“You okay?” Joel signs.

Sam nods again, pressing the sleeping bag to his nose and mouth, and Joel bends down to pat his back before going to sit in the blue chair by the desk next to Ellie’s bed, crossing his arms across his chest. The chair is too little for him and he looks kind of silly. He’s looking off into the distance and Sam follows his gaze to the window, where snow is still falling down, illuminated by the streetlights outside.

—

The room reminds Joel of Sarah’s. He tries over and over to push the thought out of his mind, but in the stillness of the night, sitting here in this child-sized desk chair for hours now, the silence occasionally broken by Ellie’s coughs and congested breathing and Sam’s soft snoring, it’s all he can think about. The girl who’d lived here before the outbreak must have been just about Sarah’s age, the room with its mix of little girl decor and hints of the teenager she was becoming, pastel pink wallpaper with rock band posters taped on the wall.

He tears his eyes away from the Radiohead poster over the bed to look over at Ellie, which only makes his anxiety spike.

She’s been tossing and turning all night, not soothed at all by the cool washcloths on her forehead or the second dose of painkillers midway through the night. Now, though, she seems too still. Her back is to him and he can’t tell if she’s breathing. His mouth goes dry. He should’ve radioed for the doctor earlier, when it didn’t seem like she was responding to the medicine—

She rolls over with a little sniffle. Her eyes are open, looking towards him, although her gaze is unfocused and she doesn’t really seem to be seeing him. She shakes her head into her pillow, mumbling something he can’t quite make out.

“What’s that?” he says.

She takes a shaky breath, her eyes welling up with tears. “I wanna go home.”

He nods. Something about seeing her here in this room makes him keenly aware of how young she is, how frightening the past months must have been for her, with him failing her at every turn, barely even making it here by the skin of their teeth.

“I want Riley,” she goes on, her voice pleading and small.

“Is that someone who looked after you in Boston?” Joel asks.

“My friend,” she says, taking a breath that turns into a sob and then a cough.

He puts a hand to her forehead for what feels like the hundredth time tonight. She’s still disconcertingly warm.

“How are you feelin’?” he asks.

She shakes her head pitifully.

There’s a gentle knock on the door. The door creaks opens and Tommy raises a hand in greeting. It’s surreal, seeing him here, safe and sound and strangely domestic, after months of worrying about him being stranded and alone out here.

“You need any help?” he whispers.

“We’re fine,” Joel says, more defensive than he means to be.

“I can stay up with her if you want to try and get a couple hours of sleep,” Tommy offers.

Joel frowns. It’s the second time he’s made that offer tonight. Joel can’t agree to it, the fever and the drugs have Ellie saying all kinds of shit, and he’s terrified she’d say something about getting bit in front of Tommy. Earlier, when Tommy was pressing him for more information after the doctor left, Joel told him that Ellie’s people are Fireflies and that they headed west to find them. While he’s sure he could trust Tommy with knowing about her immunity eventually if it comes down to it, he’s not about to let the kid beat him to the chase. Once Ellie’s feeling better and Henry’s back, he’ll figure all that out.

“No,” Ellie says resolutely before Joel can respond, narrowing her eyes at Tommy.

Joel shrugs apologetically. “I’ll get some rest later, Tom, I don’t mind. You know me, I worry, I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyways.”

Tommy nods, pressing his lips together in a tight smile.

“Did he go down okay?” he asks, gesturing to Sam, who’s curled up on the trundle bed on the other side of the room, using Henry’s sleeping bag as a blanket. “Seemed pretty scared this evening.”

“Yeah. He’s worried about his brother.” Joel raises an eyebrow, giving Tommy another look. “Reckon I know what that feels like, not knowin’ what happened to your brother, whether he’s alright or—”

He’s interrupted by Ellie grabbing his wrist, staring at him with round and glassy eyes.

“Where’s Sam?” she asks, panicked.

She’s asked about Sam probably half a dozen times since they got to Jackson. It makes Joel’s heart ache that she feels so responsible for him. He’d planned on moving Sam to the other bedroom once he fell asleep so he’d be less likely to catch Ellie’s illness, but it doesn’t seem fair to either of the kids to let them wake up feeling any more frightened and alone than they already do.

“Sam’s right here,” Joel says, shifting over so that she can see the little boy sleeping peacefully.

Ellie watches him for a moment, but none of the fear seems to leave her face. She shakes her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “We gotta look out for him. Henry’s— hurt.”

“Henry’ll be alright, he’s at the clinic, they’re just fixin’ up his arm,” Joel reassures her. “The doctor said he’ll be home in the morning. Everyone’s okay. You need to get some rest, you’ll feel better.”

“Don’t leave me,” she says, holding his wrist tighter.

“I’m right here,” he says. “You gotta try and some sleep so you feel better in the morning, alright?”

Ellie sniffles, settling her head back onto her pillow.

“You rest up,” he goes on. “If you’ve got more of an appetite in the morning, Tommy brought you some pie, you can have it for breakfast, how’s that sound?”

She nods, and her grip on his wrist relaxes a little, but she doesn’t let go. With his free hand, he takes the striped bedspread that she’s kicked down to her feet and pulls it back up over her shoulders, resting his palm on her back between her shoulder blades over the blanket— just to check on her breathing, he tells himself, trying not to think at all about how she relaxes at the contact, or how that in turn quiets some of the anxiety buzzing around inside him.

“Holler if you need me, I’ll be just down the hall,” Tommy says, his voice quiet.

Joel nods, glancing back up at Tommy, who’s still standing in the doorway, watching him with soft eyes. Tommy gives him a quick nod in return and he closes the door with a soft click.

“Joel?” Ellie mumbles, her eyes starting to droop closed.

He sighs. “You need to get to sleep, kiddo.”

She’s quiet for a moment, and he wonders if maybe she’s fallen asleep, if she just needed the reassurance that he was still there. Something like muscle memory has kicked in and he’s gently rubbing his thumb back and forth where his hand’s resting over her back. But after a beat, she speaks again.

“Don’t leave me,” she says again, more urgently than before. Her voice is hoarse and ragged, barely more than a whisper, but she keeps talking, staring at the wall behind him, a tear spilling down her cheek onto the pillow. “Everybody leaves. Riley was my best friend, and she— I had to kill her, when we both got bit at that stupid fuckin’ mall. I— didn’t turn.” Her eyes flit back up to him. “I fuckin’ waited and waited.”

“Jesus,” Joel says, shaking his head as if that might keep that horrible mental image from sticking in his mind. “Ellie—”

“I don’t wanna think about it anymore,” she sniffles.

He hums in agreement. “You think about something nice and get some rest.”

“I can’t,” she says, her voice cracking. “Whenever I start thinking about it, I can’t fuckin’ stop.”

Joel nods, understanding. He meets Ellie’s eyes and something like a flash of recognition crosses her face.

“Do you do that, when you think about Sarah?” she whispers.

Joel freezes, sure that he must have misheard her, but she’s still staring at him, waiting for an answer.

“Tommy told you about her?” he asks, although he can’t recall when that could have happened, Ellie’s been practically glued to his side since they got here.

She shakes her head. “I heard you tell Henry, back in Nebraska.” There’s something accusatory in the way she says it, he told Henry her name and not Ellie— we keep our histories to ourselves. “She died?”

He blinks and nods once, unable to speak.

“Do you—?” she starts again.

“Ellie,” he interrupts her, sharper than he knows he should talk to a feverish, half-delirious little girl. “That’s enough.”

She stares at him for a moment longer, her face suddenly serious, almost stern, before letting go of his wrist and rolling over, kicking her blankets back off again.

He glances down at his hand, flexing it uselessly before scrubbing it across his face and crossing his arms across his chest, bringing his gaze back up to the posters on the wall, trying to take a breath to steady himself, to push the thought of failing her over and over again out of his mind, but Ellie’s right— once he starts, he can’t stop thinking about it.

—

Henry looks down at his arm in the dim early morning light, shifting his weight on the thin mattress of the clinic bed. His arm’s got a bandage and a splint on it, wrapped up in a sling. Despite the painkillers they’ve got him on, it’s still sore, painful if he tries to move at all, but it’s still worlds better than it felt last night. He’s still a little queasy at the memory of the jagged bone cutting through his skin, and even more queasy at the thought of how much worse it could have been if he’d fallen a little differently.

He frowns, an urgent thought cutting through the haze in his brain and the dulled ache in his body. He needs to get back to Sam and Ellie. They were with Joel, probably went wherever Joel’s brother is, but Henry has no fucking idea where that would be.

He glances around the quiet, empty room, wondering whether anyone else is even in the building, and he startles when he spots a little girl about Ellie’s age standing in the doorway, staring at him with round eyes. She raises her hand in a small wave when they make eye contact.

“Is Talia here?” she asks. When she doesn’t get a response, she adds, “My sister. She works here.”

“Oh,” Henry says, vaguely recalling the girl who was here with the doctor last night, although it’s all kind of a blur. “Yeah, I think she was—”

“You’re here with Tommy Miller’s brother?” the girl interrupts him, clearly not all that interested in finding her sister.

Henry nods.

“How’d you find Jackson?” she asks.

He shrugs. “It’s a long story.”

“Dina, quit bothering him.”

A young woman, Talia, walks in through the doorway. She looks to be about Henry’s age, wearing a scratched pair of glasses and her dark hair tied up in a ponytail. He recognizes her from last night, and he suddenly feels a slight pang of embarrassment that she saw him in the state he was in yesterday with his broken arm, which he in turn feels silly about— it’s her fucking job. He sits up a little straighter, fidgeting with the sling around his arm.

“How’s your arm feeling?” Talia asks, looking him up and down.

“A lot better,” he says, although the way he winces as he turns towards her doesn’t make that very convincing. “Am I good to go? I need to get back to my brother.”

Talia nods, pursing her lips.

“These were the notes from Jim, he figured you’d probably want it in writing since you were kind of out of it last night,” she says, picking up a piece of yellowed paper and a bottle of pills and handing them to him, their hands brushing for a moment. “They’re in the blue house on Rancher Street, it’s across the street from Tommy and Maria’s, you’ll turn left out of here and—”

“We can walk him there,” Dina offers, bouncing up once onto her toes. “It’s kind of on our way. You told me we could go pick up those sweet rolls from the dining hall when you were done working.”

Talia glances back to give her a look. “I’m still technically on duty—”

“No one else is here, you have your radio,” Dina whines, making her eyes big and sad. “Those rolls are a Jackson Christmas tradition.”

“We don’t even celebrate Christmas, you little weirdo,” Talia says, but there’s no bite to her words.

Dina shrugs. “You said Hanukkah starts tonight this year, so you could pretend that they’re Hanukkah sweet rolls, too, if you’re really morally opposed to eating Baby Jesus’s birthday breakfast.”

Talia rolls her eyes and heads off to grab her things. Dina trails close behind, saying something else just out of Henry’s earshot that makes Talia roll her eyes again and elbow her. When they come back a few moments later, Talia’s carrying a dark green jacket with a fur-trimmed hood, which she hands to Henry.

He shakes his head. “This isn’t mine.”

“Your old one had a lot of blood on it,” Talia explains matter-of-factly. “Didn’t smell great either.”

“When Tally and I first got here, I’m pretty sure they burned our old clothes,” Dina says. “They stunk.”

Henry takes the coat and manages to get the hood up over his head with his good arm, then gets his arm through a sleeve, but he can’t quite reach to get it over the shoulder of his broken arm. Talia watches for a moment, then, slightly awkwardly, reaches over and gingerly eases the coat over his shoulder.

“Thanks,” he says, a little sheepish. “My backpack—?”

“Tommy’s brother probably has it, you didn’t come in with one.” She gives him a look that he can’t quite read. “No one here stole it, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

The snow is still coming down when they step outside, but not as heavily as it was yesterday. There’s people out and about, clearly used to the shitty weather, going about their work— stacking firewood, shoveling snow, carrying baskets of vegetables out of greenhouses. There’s echoes here of the QZ in its more peaceful moments, at least the way things were in the early years when Henry was a little kid and things hadn’t gotten as bad yet with KC FEDRA, but what it really reminds him of is his mom’s stories about how the world was before.

They pass by buildings labeled as a daycare, a library, a trading post. There’s a bulletin board with a poster stuck on it advertising a New Year’s Eve dance and a fucking Christmas tree in the middle of the main street.

“This place is a— settlement?” he asks.

The little ragtag group at the airport in Cody was what he’d pictured when he’d heard people talk about settlements outside of the QZs. This place feels much more substantial than that.

Dina nods eagerly. “It’s a commune. We have a town council that all the adults vote for, and everybody rotates jobs and stuff.”

“You’d think she’s, like, the fucking mayor,” Talia mutters, with a hint of a fond smile on her lips. “It’s a nice place. Safe.”

Henry nods, taking another moment to look around. It’s not so much the place itself that’s different— it’s the people. There’s some small groups standing around making amiable conversation, a couple of kids Sam’s age running around on their own and playing in the snow, shouting and laughing. No one’s looking over their shoulder or eyeing each other suspiciously. All those years talking about resistance, about overthrowing FEDRA, and yet he’d never really stopped to think about what it would actually look like for a place to be run by the people.

“How long have you lived here?” he asks.

Talia glances up for a moment, doing the math in her head. “Dina was eleven, so it’ll be three years this spring.”

He smiles— he measures time the same way, by how old Sam was when something happened.

They turn the corner onto a residential street, rows of two-story houses with big front porches and warm light glowing through some of the windows into the hazy gray light of the winter morning.

“Did you two live in a QZ before you came here?” he asks Talia.

She shakes her head emphatically, but doesn’t offer an explanation.

Dina, however, is eager to share. “We lived in New Mexico when I was little, just us and our mom, but—”

“Dee,” Talia interrupts with a slight shake of her head, “he doesn’t want to hear all our business.”

Dina makes a face, but changes the subject anyways. “How old’s your brother?”

“He’s eight,” Henry says.

“Were you in a QZ before?” Dina asks.

Henry nods. “Kansas City. Joel and Ellie came from Boston.”

“Ellie’s the girl who Tommy said is my age,” Dina says to Talia— clearly this was already a topic of conversation between the two of them.

The front door of a blue house a little ways down the road flies open and Sam comes running down the road to him, wearing a pair of too-big rubber boots, nearly wiping out on an icy patch but recovering quickly, grinning as he races over. Henry barely has time to brace himself before Sam flings himself at him, squeezing his arms around his middle.

“Careful,” Henry laughs, wrapping his good arm around Sam and protectively moving his broken arm closer to his body, pressing a kiss to the top of Sam’s head.

After a moment, Sam pulls away from him so that he can sign.

“I missed you so much,” he says, his eyes welling up with tears. “Is your arm broken really bad?”

Henry shakes his head. “The doctor fixed it, I’ll be okay. I missed you, too.”

It’s a little awkward, trying to sign one-handed, but Sam seems to be able to understand him. He clings to Henry again, pressing his face into the fabric of his new green coat, and Henry holds him tight. He glances up and sees Talia and Dina standing side by side a few feet away, watching quietly, hands stuffed in the pockets of their coats. The wind picks up a little, tugging a few strands of hair loose from Talia’s ponytail and dusting her hair with snowflakes, making her glasses fog up a little.

“Jim will be around to check on Ellie later, but, um—” she shrugs, gesturing to the walkie-talkie clipped to her coat pocket, “I have the clinic radio on me if there’s anything urgent.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Enjoy your Baby Jesus sweet rolls.”

Dina grins and Talia shakes her head, nearly masking her smile, before both heading off towards the dining hall.

“Sam?” a voice calls from the blue house.

For a moment Henry assumes it’s Joel, but as they walk to the house, a dark-haired man is standing in the doorway, looking relieved when he spots Sam returning. He doesn’t look much like Joel, but something about his mannerisms and the worried way his brow is furrowed makes it obvious that they’re related.

“You must be Tommy,” Henry says.

Tommy nods, moving out of the doorway so that they can step into the house, which is warm and dry, with a fire going in the fireplace and the smell of some savory food wafting through the air, suddenly reminding Henry that he hasn’t eaten anything in ages.

Tommy gestures to Sam, who ducks shyly behind Henry. “This one’s been missin’ you.”

Henry reaches behind himself to put a hand on Sam’s back. “I missed him, too. Joel told you he can’t hear, right? You were calling for him—”

“Yeah, I know, I just didn’t know where he ran off to.” Tommy shrugs apologetically. “You feelin’ alright? Sounded like you had quite a fall.”

Henry nods, then frowns. “I thought they said we had to quarantine, with Ellie being sick.”

“Yeah, usually it’s just about a week or so.”

“Should you be here, then?” Henry asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Tommy says, understanding. “I told Joel I could quarantine with y’all, help out and whatnot. He’s upstairs with Ellie, first door at the top of the stairs.”

“Thanks,” he says.

When Henry heads upstairs and opens the door with Sam peeking around from behind him, Joel’s sitting in a small rolling desk chair next to the bed Ellie’s sleeping in, staring absently into space. Ellie seems to be sleeping more peacefully than she had been their last few days on the road, curled up on her side with her hands tucked under her chin, her face nestled into the pillow.

“Is she doing any better?” Henry asks quietly.

Joel startles at the sound of his voice. His face is pale and there’s dark circles under his eyes. He looks over at Henry, taking a moment to process what he said.

“She’s been out of it, but her fever finally broke, looks like,” he says, his voice gravelly and tired. “They gave her some antibiotics and painkillers. How’s your arm?”

Henry shrugs. “Better, kind of.”

Joel nods and they both grow quiet again for a moment. Sam presses closer to Henry. There’s a heaviness to the silence, Henry can tell there’s something on Joel’s mind, but he also knows him well enough to know that asking about it would be futile.

Just then, Ellie’s eyes flutter open. She smiles when she sees Henry and Sam in the doorway, and her smile widens when she turns her head and spots Joel, looking relieved, as if she hadn’t expected him to be there.

“I’m sorry—” she starts, her voice strained, but Joel shakes his head, cutting her off.

“You feelin’ better?” he asks, clearly not wanting to dwell on whatever she was apologizing for.

She nods. It’s clear that she is better, she seems much more clear-eyed and aware than she had been the last time Henry saw her.

“I think Tommy has some food downstairs if you’re hungry,” Henry says.

Ellie nods again, propping herself up with her elbows and turning back to Joel.

“When can we leave?” she asks, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “Does Tommy know where the Fireflies are? Did you ask him?”

Joel shakes his head, frowning.

“He doesn’t know, or you didn’t ask him?” she persists.

“Ellie,” Joel says. “You worry about getting better first, you ain’t in any state to be getting back on the road right now.”

She lets her head fall back on her pillow, annoyed but clearly exhausted, not exactly disproving Joel’s point, and she doesn’t push the matter any further.

“You said I could have pie for breakfast,” she says to Joel.

He nods, getting up and heading for the door. “We’ll see what we’ve got.”

He nods. “We’ll see what we’ve got.”

Tommy’s wife apparently dropped off Christmas presents that she picked up for the kids last night, two small stuffed animals made of scrap fabric, a bear and a lion, which Tommy has set up on the table. Sam gives Tommy a small, guarded smile when he spots them. Tommy grins in return.

It’s strange, Henry thinks, being somewhere so safe and secure, somewhere that could be home, after so long not having that. He hates the thought of Ellie already being so anxious to leave. But for now, they’re all here, safe and warm and healing. Sam holds out a strawberry to him, his eyes wide.

“It’s so good,” he signs.

Henry nods in agreement.