Chapter Text
Ellie could feel the soft, rotting wood of the floorboards beneath her, with the hard sole of a military boot on her back pressing her into the stench of mould. Icy gusts of wind rattled the broken window frames, settling into her bones so deeply she thought they may crack. Blood trickled down her forehead, an open slice across her hairline, enveloping her left eye in a scarlet haze. All this, though, she was used to, sensations that were par for the course in the only life Ellie had ever known. The sounds that filled the room, on the other hand, would haunt her until she was six feet under.
Howls of pain, guttural and violent, snapped across the frigid air. Ellie had seen people murdered before. Hell, Ellie had murdered before. This, though, this was torture. She could barely recognise the face of the man who she’d traversed the country with, who she’d seen every day since she was fourteen years old. Joel’s face was a mess of open wounds and fresh bruising, swelling covering both eyes, cuts slashing across his lips. His hands, his careful hands that had painstakingly dragged her across every body of water in the continental United States, laid beside him, splayed on the soaked floorboards, fingers a mess of broken bones and torn nails. The rest of him, a small mercy, was blocked by the broad body of yet another military soldier she did not recognise, a long braid falling across her shoulders.
Ellie knew she was yelling and screaming for him to get up, to do something, to fight back, like he always had. Ellie knew she was making more noise than her small body could produce, but she could hear nothing but the shrieks that emitted from the broken husk of the closest thing she’d ever had for a father. It was such a foreign sound for him to make. Even when he had fallen on that rebar at the university, he had remained stoic and strong. Every wound, broken bone, and infection she’d seen him through, Joel had barely made a sound. She knew, then, that this would live inside her head forever, curling around her brain and wriggling into every empty moment.
She struggled against the grip of the soldier above her, desperately trying to reach Joel. His captor raised a long, thin pole that glittered in the fading light of the room, the end curved menacingly into a solid mass. Ellie swore she could hear her.. giggle as she brought it down upon Joel’s skull with a sickening thud. Bile rose in her chest at the sound of that club making contact with Joel’s skull, the acidic burning filling her lungs and throat. Her vomit spilled out of her cracked lips, over the cheek that was pressed into the floor, and dribbled down her front, something she wouldn’t have even realised unless another soldier, one just watching this whole display, jeered at her in words that didn’t seem to make it into her ears. The cruel laughter, though, reverberated through her skull, like the clanging of a church bell, as Ellie tried her best to focus on the scene in front of her.
Somewhere, in the labyrinth of fear and panic in her brain, she thought that maybe, just maybe, there would be some comfort for Joel if he knew she was there, that he wasn’t alone in this. She searched for some kind of magic word that would make him snap out of this and fight back. She opened her mouth to plead, not sure if the appeal was directed at Joel, his attacker or some higher power she didn’t believe in, right as the stiff heel of a military boot came down against her own head.
*
“Nggh,” Ellie muttered. Her eyes fluttered open, though her vision was blurred. She could just barely make out a familiar room. The walls were a harsh white that burned her aching eyes, and there were vague shapes in clinical grey. She forced herself to blink a few times, raising one hand to try to wipe away the film that covered her vision. At the movement, a dull ache spread across her shoulder and down her back, making her wince and wriggle. The pain reminded her of what she’d just witnessed. Ellie’s heart began to beat rapidly, louder in her ear drums than the machine beside her, and she could feel sweat erupt down her palms. One thought echoed through her mind: Joel.
She felt heat behind her eyes, and a tourniquet around her heart, as she heaved, desperately trying to catch a breath. Wiping her eyes again, ignoring the pain now, her vision cleared a little, and she recognised her surroundings as one of the clinic rooms in Jackson’s medical centre. Ellie tried to swing her legs out of the narrow hospital bed, but they felt leaden. She picked one up with her hands, barely registering the four different wires taped into the leaves of her tattoo, and shoved it off, with the second following. Her legs on the floor, she cringed as she tried to raise the rest of her body up and off, shaking like a newborn deer. Within a few seconds of standing, her knees buckled beneath her, and the room shifted. The floor cradled her face, as the walls seemed to dance around her. A cacophony of beeping filled her ears, and she swore she could hear someone screaming, though she didn’t know if it was emitting from her own mouth, or someone else’s.
Several bodies rushed into the room. Their clothes, stained scrub tops were almost too ordinary, the handguns sticking out of their waistbands the only thing serving as a reminder that afflicted did, in fact, roam outside the walls of Jackson, Wyoming. Ellie’s eyes focused on these guns, as veritable strangers hauled her body back into bed. Having something to focus on seemed to dampen the bile that threatened to emerge from her throat again.
Guns. She thought of the first time she had ever shot a gun, really shot a gun. Playing around with the tiny pistol Riley pilfered off a sleeping guard at military school did not count, neither did shooting rats with a BB gun. No, her head flooded with the memory of when Joel was cornered by all those hunters, and used his gun to protect him. She remembered the pistol he’d gifted her after. She still had it, though it lay in a box under her bed, along with the tape of the rocket take off he had given her for her birthday, and every other sickeningly thoughtful gift. Every memory she had, there he was. Pain rattled in her chest, though this time it was from an ache in her heart, not the radiating throb coming from her limbs and lower back.
Ellie was snapped out of her hazy thoughts by a light shining into first her left eye, and then her right one. She tried to swat it away, groaning and grumbling. An awful taste flooded her mouth, rotten and foul.
“Ellie? Ellie, it’s okay.” This was a voice she recognised, a voice she’d know at the end of the world, which this may well be. It was a voice that reminded her of apples dipped in honey, and the soothing words that she often needed to drift into sleep. It was Dina’s voice. Her face swam into Ellie’s field of vision, a mass of fluffy curls puffing out behind her careworn, beautiful face, creased with concern.
“Di-,” Ellie tried to get out, though her throat was raw, and the acrid taste on her tongue made her recoil.
“It’s okay, Ellie. You’re in Jackson. You’re safe.” The words bore into her brain, and rooted themselves there. Suddenly, she was aware that she was lying flat on the sheets again, the mattress sagging beneath her. The machines were quieter, and a sigh escaped from her lips, as she attempted to form the one question she had, the only thing that she cared about.
“J-,”
“Joel? He’s here, too.”
He’s here, too.