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Nebraska goes on forever, snow and plains and more snow.
Joel doesn’t sleep, after Kansas City. Not much.
Not that he really had before.
It takes its toll. He knows that. Knows better. But when he closes his eyes he sees muzzle flash. Creeping tendrils, reaching, breathing. Tess’s eyes, imploring, or Sarah’s, or…
Ellie looks back at him. She’s taken to walking ahead almost all the time, lately, outpacing his stiff, limping, old man’s gait. His knees hurt in the mornings, one more than the other. That's not really new. It just is.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer quick enough and she shrugs, turns around again.
Ellie has gone quiet, after Kansas City.
Flat as the landscape.
Flat as him.
-
In the morning, he wakes with a groan. She’s sitting next to the meager fire- carefully built, dug into the ground to reduce the smoke- and looking at him.
“You’re sick,” she accuses.
He wipes his face; glances at her. Sighs and bends himself up and onto a knee, ignoring the twinging white heat that shoots through it when he does. That's just wear and tear, and he's used to it. But his heart on the other hand. His heart is… there’s a subtle ache in his chest; his pulse, thready in his throat, fluttering under his ribs and collarbone. He wonders if he’s gonna have a heart attack one of these days. Just up and collapse like the old man he's become. Except he knows better; knows that this isn't disease, or age. It's worse, because it's something he oughta be able to stave off. It's fear. It's stress.
He doesn't get... panic attacks. He doesn't.
“I’m fine,” he rasps. His head aches. There’s congestion in his face, in his sinuses. He’s lightheaded when he stands, and has to clench his core to shunt the blood up, because his vision goes grey and for a minute he thinks he really is gonna just keel over.
How can you get the flu when there’s no one around to get it from?
“Let’s get going,” he mutters, barely looking at her, not wanting her to stare back at him and see right through him when she does.
-
The wind is biting; it makes your face hurt. Except his face already hurts, so the cold is kind of numbing it a bit. Seeping ice into the aching chambers behind his eyes and nose- which is somehow both stopped up and running, in the cold.
She doesn’t see him stumble over a low spot he hadn't seen, trudging along as he is; she’s at the crest of the shrub-spattered hill they're climbing, shading her eyes against the late afternoon sun. “There,” she calls back. “There’s a farm.”
He draws level with her, wincing as he adjusts his pack. “Yeah. Let’s check it out.”
The snow is knee high and powder fine on the way down; it drags at them, makes it slow going.
The homestead is clear of both infected and people. And supplies. It’s well ransacked, long picked over, abandoned, and ignored. There’s a scraggle of weeds outside the back porch that offers a measly offering of carrots long gone to seed. They dig in hopes of finding last spring's roots, and are rewarded with a few frail tendrils of pithy branching things, woody and vaguely orange, that they eat raw.
“The greens are good too,” he tells her.
“Ew,” she complains, making a face at the bitterness, but she swallows some anyway. They’re low on supplies, the last rabbit he’d shot down to a few scraps of jerky that they chew in silent solidarity while they melt snow; take stock; repurpose some dusty old couch cushions into beds on the wooden floor.
She keeps eyeballing him, sidelong. He controls his breathing, feeling like his air's coming through a clogged pipe and trying not to let it show.
-
In the middle of the night, he hasn’t but just gotten to sleep when he wakes himself coughing. The fit takes him until his ribs hurt, almost as much as his raw throat.
“Joel,” she calls, concerned.
“…I’m alright,” he rasps, when he has enough breath.
"-you're-"
"I said I'm alright."
She hushes, but he can feel her being cross and concerned at him without looking at her.
He shifts his body around, tries to get comfortable, to let his muscles rest at least.
It’s no good.
He folds his arms, hugs himself, just rides it out. Sipping air slowly, like he's taking it through a straw, to keep from hacking on it. Feeling his pulse throbbing in his sinuses, thudding in his temples. Trying not to move too much because the shifting pressure in his skull when he does makes it feel like it's gonna burst.
By morning he’s sitting on the wooden floor, his back against the broad flat of a load bearing beam that’s hewn from an entire tree trunk. He watches the cold trickle of dawn light glaze the window in front of him. Ellie is sleeping softly, to his left, curled and somehow tangled in her sleeping bag in the way that only teenagers seem to be able to tangle themselves. She’ll be annoyed that he hadn’t woken her for her turn at keeping watch. He doesn’t particularly care.
He starts to stand and gets as far as leaning forward about three inches before he stops and drops his head back against the beam, because there’s an icepick behind his eyes. His chest hurts, around his racing heart and up into his throat.
They need to move. He needs to hunt.
He’s too old. He’s not gonna be enough.
He tries again, pushes through the stiff, sick ache in his joints, and gets himself all the way up onto one knee before his vision blacks.
“Joel?”
He grunts, focused on not falling over.
“…are you okay?” She’s peering at him from inside her sleeping bag like she can see right through him.
No. He’s less than he should be. He’s old. He’s weak. He’s scared of the feeling in his heart. He’s scared he’s gonna get them killed. Or just die and leave her alone to die too.
“…yeah,” he says, "I'm alright," and pushes himself to his feet, the beam a second body holding him up, letting him know which way up is.
“…I’m fucking sore," she says. "Can we just stay here today? One more night?”
He gives her a sidelong look. She’s full of shit. She’s eyeballing him judgementally.
“We should keep moving,” he mutters.
She looks at him some more. Looks at their kit, and at the door, and at the light in the window.
“That's stupid,” she snarks.
He levels his gaze on her.
She's not having it. “We should at least go hunting. You know, restock. We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. It's not like anyone's that's gonna find us couldn't find us just as easily on the road.”
He closes his eyes, tilting his forehead into the beam. It’s smooth and rough at the same time. The pressure feels good against his skull. Or… maybe not good, exactly, but it kinda helps.
She’s not completely wrong.
How far do you think you’ll make it old man.
It’s only going to get worse, the longer we spend getting there.
...you aren't gonna be effective if you don't sleep.
I'm fine.
He sighs.
“…there were tracks outside. Farmhouse pigs I guess, gone feral.” He looks for his rifle and finds it where he left it, leaned up against the same beam that he's leaned on. “Probably could get one.”
.
They do.
The air and the light pierce through the fog in his brain a little and while his head and joints ache, the walk gets his blood moving, lymph flowing. Well enough at least to run him long enough to take a small boar, rooting with its herd in the thicket of a patch of forest not a half mile from the homestead, almost oblivious to their presence. They were potbellies once, or their ancestors were, and- while they've morphed over generations to something a little more coarse, a little more lean- their aggression and survival instincts are nothing to the feral hogs that had used to roam Texas. That must still do, really, and in greater numbers now.
Anyway, the gunshot sends the rest flying; they'll be warier of the scent of humans from now on. But he'd got a clean shot on the boar. Luck on their side, for once.
They hang the pig's carcass in the barn to bleed it. She demands to help dress it. He makes her go back into the farmhouse to heat water instead.
His hands shake while he works, and he curses at them.
-
Wood smoke. Crackling. A modicum of heat.
Joel opens his eyes, frowning at it, and then squinches them shut again against the light, which is all from the fire because it’s dark out.
“Why’d you let me fall asleep,” he complains, and coughs, sparking fire in his throat and chest. He groans at it.
“Seemed like you needed it,” she sasses.
The world is a sloshing soup around him. His head…
He’s shivering, he realizes, and nauseous to boot. The room tilts and whirls, and he shudders and coils within it.
Something touches his head, and he flinches.
“You’re too hot,” she tells him.
“‘m alright,” he insists, but she ain’t stupid.
“Right,” she drawls.
He’s too old, too tired, too weak. Useless. Failing her. Again.
“I’m keeping watch tonight. You’re gonna sleep.”
“Ellie-“
“It’s the flu, isn’t it? Something like that.” She doesn’t wait for him to answer, prattling on while she chews on a scrap of jerky. “I went to class with the flu once.”
He blinks.
Her eyes are glittering, a sly smile pulling at her cheeks. “Yeah, it was sick.”
He groans, and not just because his head is killing him.
Though... that too.
-
He dreams of the bullet, spinning. Of blood and grey matter and skull fragments hanging in the air in slow motion, frozen and so much the gorier in the dreaming, the projectile taking Henry's brain with it on the way out, except it's also his own, in the universe where he didn't flinch.
He comes to with a jolt, his fingers wound tight in the shirt under his head. The room is dark, lit only with the sharp edges of starlight at the windowpanes.
He inhales, and coughs on it.
"Ellie?" Where is she?
He sits up. His heart is a rapid tattoo in his ribcage, a pulse in his diaphragm.
"Ellie!" he rasps, and drags himself to his feet, staggering as his knee twinges.
Her sleeping bag is a puddle on the floor near him, her tattered book nestled in it. He grabs his rifle, his flashlight.
He gets two steps in, cool metal at his cheek, and slows to a stalk when he hears the door creak, finger on the switch of the flashlight, thinking to blind when the door clears line of sight.
"Don't shoot me," she says. She stamps snow off her boots, is wiping her hands together.
He glowers at her, and she makes a face at him while he lowers the rifle, the light.
"What were you doing."
She gives him a look that says duh. "...perimeter patrol? C'mon, man!"
He shakes his head, adrenaline comedown making him woozy and a little euphoric, and slings the rifle.
"Have you..." Ellie is exhorting. "Seen this? You gotta come out here."
"Seen what."
"The stars, dude! Come here! You gotta see this shit!"
"-of course I've seen..." but she's already rushing to grab him by the sleeve and lead him out, and she's animated and alive, and he finds himself a little in awe of her as he follows.
"I thought the stars in the woods were fucking amazing," she's going on, "but this is like..."
It's a crystal clear night. The snow crunches under their feet. The carpet of the Milky Way is shimmering, blazing, holy. It stretches over the tapestry of low hills, pale with snow and starlight and the wash of a high-hung crescent moon.
She tugs him down beside her onto a wide stump, the faint light washing her features as soft as the snowy curves of the land, tracing her forehead. She's captivated, her expression caught somewhere between hushed awe and wild joy. He looks at her, and something stirs in his chest that aches and twinges. He looks back at the stars instead. At the hills. At the way you can see the dark side of the moon, embraced in its brilliant crescent, and the color in the sky- because there's color in the stars, which he always seems to forget when he's not looking at them. It's been a long time since he bothered to look at them.
The hush is almost complete- you can just about hear the snow settle. Then there's a momentary streaking blaze. Ellie gasps at it, the tiniest inhale. "See!? Shooting star!"
"Ah, man.." he murmurs, when it's followed by another, distant memory stirring. "It's November, right?" He points her to the place where the trail's fading out. "It's the Leonids."
Another meteor burns out above them. She drags her gaze away from it, looking at him suspiciously.
"How do you know that?"
"You callin' me stupid?"
"Welllll..."
"Shut up." But he finds a ghost of a smile playing at his lips.
"You just don't seem like-"
"...the type to know about astronomy and shit. Yeah, I know."
"...maybe." She sounds thoughtful. The fog of her breath is visible in the starlight. "So they're comet crumbs! From the Temple-Tuttle. Approximately every thirty-three years," she recites, "there's a whole storm. But the last one was like... 2001, so..."
"Okay, see, I didn't know all that." He side-eyes her, and restrains a cough. "Show off."
The cold is biting, except where she's sitting close to his side, and he shivers and sniffs.
"Oh, fuck, right... you're sick..." she shifts to stand.
"Eh. Cold felt kinda nice," he says, because it does against his face.
She mother hens him up anyway, and he almost chuckles at her despite the headache.
...she looks back at the sky over her shoulder as they return though, and he walks a little more slowly than he has to, giving her time to drink it in.
The ache in his chest bubbles into...
God, he can't do this.
He can't care this much.
Sam's blood pooling on the floor underneath her, agonized horror in her eyes, that weight of responsibility that...
He can't.
The memory of starlight. Think about that. The way the pollution's been cleared out of the atmosphere, the stars like something you could drink and the moon hanging like a jewel you could reach up and pluck out of the velvet dark. The size of the universe and how they’re only ants in it, insignificant. To live or die as the world sees fit, the two of them-
No.
The road ahead, the miles yet to go, and making his legs take him over them. Counting steps along the way. Think about that.
The only thing there's room to think about is right now. Sleep, wake, walk, move.
That's all there is.
So he tells his heart, as it races in his chest.
Snow, and plains, and more snow.
Somehow, Joel sleeps.
He dreams of snow, and the ground underfoot. Of blood, and starry nightscapes, and Ellie (or is it Sarah?), with her face turned up, glazed in soft midnight light, and he doesn't know if the widening of her (their?) eyes is the creeping reach of death or the wonder of meteors.
Whenever he wakes he wakes to a leaden and oppressive fear hope dread longing that he just knows is going to be the death of him.