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Ellie’s tired. Hungry and cold, sure - but mostly tired, and terrified. I’m scared of ending up alone, she’d told Sam. It’s why she’d stolen the horse and taken off from Tommy’s, after she’d found out that Joel had planned on passing her off to someone else; it’s why she hadn’t hesitated to call out and let him know exactly where she was, when he and Tommy had found her a few hours later. She couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving her behind like everyone else had. But in the end, she couldn’t hide from him, either. Not when he’d tracked her down and come to find her like he had. No one else had ever done anything like that for her. No one else had cared that much.
She’s not alone. But the fear that she will be, that Joel won’t make it, that she’ll get pinned down by infected - or just lost and killed by a grizzly bear on one of her daily scavenging trips (are there grizzly bears in Colorado? She doesn’t know, she has no idea what to expect) - the fear sticks in her throat, haunting her, ever-present. She finds herself holding her breath when she returns to where she’d left him, unable to exhale until she hears the hoarse, ragged sound of his own labored breathing first.
The sun’s been setting earlier and earlier, her precious hours of daylight growing fewer every day, and the day’s shorter than ever when she comes back that night. She hadn’t been gone long, but all the same she feels exhausted, tired right down to her bones. Vaguely, she wonders how this is all going to end. She can’t keep it up forever, and Joel isn’t showing much sign of improvement. He’s still drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes lucid enough to eat and even talk to her, something like a conversation, but mostly lying pale and weak on the mattress she’d found, shivering with both cold and fever at once. Will he die first? she wonders, in her darkest moments. Or will she, out there in the cold, leaving him to waste away alone, waiting and waiting for her to come back?
Neither is a cheerful thought, and both threaten to overwhelm her. All she can do is curl up close at his side, small like a child, keeping them both as warm as possible and listening to the slow thud of his heartbeat through his shirt. As long as that heart keeps going, as long as they both keep breathing, they’re all right. We’re still alive. I’m not alone yet.
If she had to guess, it’s about a month after she’d all but dragged Joel onto Callus and booked it away from the university. She hasn’t had real food in days; everything she’s found, she’s given to Joel. Her stomach rumbles unhappily as she looks out into the snow. The sun’s already sinking towards the horizon. Just a few hours left before it gets too dark to stay out any longer.
Sighing, she gets moving, hoisting her backpack up higher onto her shoulders as she starts trudging through the snow. It seeps through the thin canvas of her shoes as she walks, soaking her socks. She hasn’t had dry feet in weeks.
The town’s pretty bare by now; she’s gone through nearly every building she can get into, ransacking them for food and supplies. They’ll have to move on, sooner or later - but the thought of moving Joel, of risking another town without knowing who or what they’ll find there, is too big and scary to contemplate, and she shoves the thought aside for the time being. Instead, she heads towards the outskirts, no plan in mind but a vague idea that maybe she can at least do some hunting. Her stomach rumbles again at the thought of meat.
There’s a rickety fence at the far side of town, and she pushes aside a loose plank and slips through, wincing as the rusty nails screech indignantly. There’s no response, though - no moaning runners, no shouts or gunfire from hunters looking for their next target. She breathes out, and straightens up, looking around.
The ground is covered in a thick layer of snow, unmarred by any footprint. The lack of animal tracks is disappointing, but despite everything, despite how scared and hungry she is, she can’t help admiring how beautiful it is, the untouched snow blanketing the landscape in soft mounds of white. Slowly, she steps forward, looking up at the bare trees above. There’s a bigger shape up ahead of her, and she squints at it curiously.
A farmhouse. It has to be, and her heart trips in hope as she quickens her pace. It’s someplace new, that she hasn’t yet picked over for food or ammo or anything else that might help them. And someplace like this, outside of town, it’s got to be better stocked, right? They’d found stockpiles of canned food on farms before. Shelves and shelves of preserves. They could have a feast.
Just as long as nobody else had gotten there first.
The farmhouse door opens with a rusty creak, and Ellie freezes, but there’s nothing but silence in reply. She moves forward carefully, staying low like Joel had taught her, listening with all her might for any danger.
The house is quiet, a thick layer of dust covering everything, and Ellie’s breathing is the only sound. It’s clear that no one’s been here for a long time.
She starts with the kitchen, optimistically, but her dreams of a feast are quickly denied. There’s no food, the cabinets bare of anything even remotely edible. Maybe hunters had raided this place after all, years ago. Maybe whoever had lived here had died here, too, starving after all the food had run out. She swallows, pushing the thought aside, and moves on.
The bathroom yields a bottle of rubbing alcohol, half full. She’d hoped vaguely for medicine, something that might help Joel, but the medicine cabinet is as empty as the kitchen shelves. The rest of the house isn’t much better: a few stray shotgun shells, a torn scrap of cloth that might be useful for a molotov. She grabs a moth-eaten blanket from an upstairs bedroom, rolling it up as tight as she can and securing it with a strip of cloth ripped from the curtain. At least they won’t freeze tonight.
Once she’s thoroughly explored the bedrooms upstairs, she heads back down for one last sweep of the main floor. Kitchen, living room, dining room...she pauses in front of one door she’d passed by earlier. Tentatively, she reaches for the handle, half-expecting it to be locked. But it opens easily, more smoothly than the front door had, revealing a dark void. A basement.
Ellie clicks on her flashlight, then licks her lips in apprehension at what she sees. The stairs aren’t rotted out or anything, but this definitely falls into creepy horror basement territory. For a moment she debates just taking what she has and going - it’s got to be getting late, right? She doesn’t want Joel to wake up and find her gone, and besides, it’s not like she hadn’t found anything - and then her stomach rumbles, and she swallows hard. No. She can’t walk away when there could be food down there.
Gathering her courage, she steps down onto the landing and makes her way one step at a time down into the dark. The staircase is wide and takes an abrupt turn to the left halfway down, and it’s not until she turns the corner that she hears the familiar sound.
“Oh shit!”
She blurts it out before she can think, a panicked whisper, and immediately clamps her mouth shut, holding her breath. But the Clickers don’t screech angrily or run to attack her. They hadn’t heard, and she lets out her breath in a slow, silent whoosh , deliberating there on the stairs.
She should turn back. Joel would tell her to. Turn back and close the door behind her and block it off and post a warning (on the right side of the Infected this time, thank you very much) and maybe set the house on fire for good measure once she’s out. Just in case.
But her flashlight is still on, shining straight ahead of her through the darkness of the room, and she lifts her eyes, following the beam of light to where it illuminates a shelf on the far wall, and the glint of metal cans stacked there neatly.
Food.
Fuck.
She retreats a little, turning her flashlight off even though she knows they can’t see it, and squeezes her eyes shut to think. It’s gotten harder and harder to survive on her lackluster hunting skills; all she’s managed to hit are smaller animals - rabbits and possums, a squirrel once that barely yielded enough meat to be worth the effort. There never seems to be enough.
The shelves are fifteen feet away, at most.
Carefully, she turns her flashlight back on and slinks down the stairs again, peeking around the corner. There are three of them between her and the shelves, standing there in that creepy way that they have, only their heads twitching as they listen.
She can do this.
She gets past the first one no problem, crouched low and creeping along the floor. She thinks of how Joel had done it, warning her to stay way back and sneaking ever so slowly past them to the supplies or ammo that lay beyond. It’s tempting to hurry, to get it over with as soon as possible - but he’d warned her, again and again, never to do that. Don’t take the risk. Better to take it slow, to be cautious, to be ever-aware of them and keep them from becoming aware of her.
As she approaches the second, it looks up, the sound of its clicking taking on a questioning cadence. She freezes, heart hammering in her chest, so loud she swears it can hear it. Holy shit, can it? Can they hear that well? Can they smell fear? She feels sick. Her eyes dart back towards the door, and she has to bite her tongue to keep from screaming, dig her nails into her palms and fight the impulse to run.
After a moment, it looks away again, the chittering slowing once more.
She closes her eyes, exhaling in relief, and starts to move again. Almost there. Just one more, and then the shelf, and -
The third clicker is right in front of the shelf.
Ellie stops, staring. From her vantage point on the stairs, she hadn’t been able to tell just how far away it was, or how close it was to her goal, but it’s right there. There’s enough space for Ellie to slide in behind it and get the food, but Joel would never have fit. That’s how close it is.
Again, she considers turning back, counting herself lucky just to get out - but she’s so close. She can nearly reach the cans from here.
She takes another breath and holds it as she inches closer. One step at a time. This time, she tries to stay calm and slow her heart rate, though she doesn’t know how much good it does. Almost through. Almost through. Almost through...
She opens up her backpack just as slowly, an inch at a time, so the zipper won’t make a sound. And then she slides in, reaching up to take the first can off the shelf.
She’s never been to one this close before, not unless they were trying to kill her. The clicking is awful this close, right in her ear, and she moves slowly, like she’s underwater. Or like she’s Dr. Daniela Star from Savage Starlight , taking giant steps on the moon in her spacesuit, floating up and up and then coming down to land softly on the rock below.
One can. Two. She settles them carefully in her backpack, wedging them in tight so they won’t shift around and clink together when she’s done. She doesn’t bother to look at what she’s grabbing, just picks up what’s closest, methodically, going through the motions while thinking as little as possible. The clicker hasn’t seemed to notice her, but she’s hyperaware of it all the same. If she loses her footing, stumbles back and brushes against it, she’s dead.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she fills her backpack, can after can, until it won’t fit any more. She kneels down, zipping it back up as slowly and carefully as she’d opened it. There’s a struggle at the end - the zipper doesn’t quite want to push past the cans stacked at the top - but she gets it close enough that it won’t slide open again (the thought of cans tumbling out of her backpack and crashing against the floor haunts her, as the thought of stepping back a half-inch too far and brushing against the clicker had haunted her). And then she slides it on, wincing at how heavy it is, and turns her sights back towards the stairs.
Past one clicker. Two. And three. It seems to take forever, to take years to sneak past them, on her hands and knees now with the heavy cans pressing down against her back. She’s taking no chances now. One step at a time. Slowly, slowly. Had she ever moved quickly in her life? Had she ever made a sound? It feels like there’s never been anything but this, the silence and the slowness and the faceless clickers standing dully in the dark and musty basement. They had been people, once. Maybe they had lived here. Maybe they’d been a family, and it had been them who’d bought the food and carefully stored it in the basement. For emergencies.
The stairs are ahead. She crawls up, not daring to hurry even now, one step at a time. Onto the landing. Around the corner. A panicked thought flashes into her brain - the door will be locked, someone came along and blocked it off or it just closed behind me and locked itself - but it’s still slightly ajar, and opens smoothly without a creak when she pushes at it.
She slips out, turns and shuts the door firmly behind her, and leans against it, letting out her held breath in a whoosh. It’s the first noise she’d made since she’d entered the basement.
“Holy fuck. ”
Her hands are shaking, but she’s not about to stay in the house a minute longer than she needs to. Instead, she grabs a kitchen chair and shoves it under the handle to the basement. There’s no lock, so that’ll have to do. There’s no way to warn anyone else, either. The chair will have to be enough.
The rolled-up blanket is still lying near the door where she’d left it, and she picks it up, clinging to it like it’s some sort of makeshift teddy bear and she’s some scared little kid. She doesn’t care. She’s got food, she’s got a blanket for Joel, and she is getting the hell away from this place.
The journey back to the house where she’d left him is uneventful. A part of her had wondered if there’d be hunters outside, waiting for her to emerge; another part of her hadn’t cared. If she’s going to die, she’d rather do it in the open with a bullet in her brain than in that basement, torn to bits by clickers. But there are no hunters, just the blinding whiteness of the snow, the stark black of empty branches against the sky as the sun dips toward the horizon. Out here, you’d never know there was anything wrong with the world at all.
Joel’s just waking when she slips inside, at the beginning of one of his short lucid periods. He turns to look at her as she shuts the door behind her, frowning when he sees her.
"Ellie? You goin’ out in that cold?”
“Hey, Joel.” She locks the door and hurries over, kneeling on the floor beside him. “Yeah, but it’s okay. Look what I got.” She unties the rolled-up blanket and shakes it out, pulling it up awkwardly over him. “And look.” She slings her backpack off and unzips it, relishing the noise it makes, familiar and loud and not dangerous at all. Not here. “I got us food. Lots of it.”
Joel can’t quite roll onto his side yet, but he reaches for one of the cans, wrapping one large hand around it and holding it up to look at. It’s a can of beans, a staple of the post-apocalyptic diet, but there’s more that she shows him - canned meat and even vegetables. “Well, I’ll be. You did good, kid.” A smile creases his tired face, and Ellie nearly bursts with happiness. His hand droops, and she grabs the beans from him, setting them carefully aside with the others as he continues. “Hope you didn’t take any risks, findin’ all that.”
She shakes her head, looking studiously at the cans instead of his face as she stacks them neatly, and tries to keep her tone casual and upbeat. “Who, me? Nah, I just found it all. Got lucky, I guess.” She glances at him, worried, but he merely gives her a tired smile, already drifting off again. He reaches out an arm, and she doesn’t hesitate to curl up at his side, pulling the blanket over her and up to her chin.
Next to Joel, under the blanket, it’s almost warm. His heartbeat is steady against her ear. The stacks of food sit safely at her back, and the clickers seem miles away, as unreal now as everything else had seemed down in that basement, when it was just her and them. She sighs quietly, her eyelids drooping as the ever-present exhaustion overtakes her at last.
We’re still alive. I’m not alone.