Chapter Text
Winter
Snow comes fast and cruel. Ellie wakes to a sky almost black with storm clouds for the first time that season and moves for shelter; knows she has maybe a day before it falls.
Town would get avalanches from the North every year, she remembers, always fucking up patrol routes, so she had kept the mountains at her back all month as she waited for winter. She’s southeast of Jackson now, if her compass holds any truth - probably a couple dozen miles away. The cold dropped below freezing a while back, needing to crack the ice in her water canteen most mornings - she’s been waiting for this.
She returns to the gas station she had passed a few nights ago, having hovered in the area since and kept close distance to it. She savours her last sunsets outside, spends the hours obsessing over rations and collecting berries - game was scarce when the days were this short. Last rabbit she had found was too weak to run, starving and huddled in a shallow burrow of permafrost, and there had been no victory in putting it down.
The garage doors are long sealed shut, likely locked from the inside and now crusted with ice; the store entrance is - her luck - jammed. She loops around the back, past gas pumps, no cars in sight; smashes the lone window, already fractured, with the butt of her pistol and vaults inside - the sudden reprieve from the wind as she drops into the dark shelter is a silence thick enough to feel.
She stands behind a till, drawers torn out from beneath and splintered at her feet, the wood long rotten into the tiled floor. Her torch sweeps across the small space - shelves emptied and bare; metal racks swept onto the floor in piles, moss creeping through fissures. She crosses all four corners of the room, using her foot to shuffle torn magazines to the side, taking note of cracks in the floor. The ceiling seems sturdy, the glass store front opposite where she entered through mostly boarded up; the single exit to the outside propped shut with a newspaper rack.
The final wall in her loop around the room sports the garage entrance - the handle breaks off easily, the door collapsing inwards as she shoulders it, navy paint peeling off and dusting the floor as she grunts. The impact stings against her cold-numbed shoulder - hell, everything aches in this fucking cold.
There are no windows, pitch black were it not for Ellie’s flashlight. The room’s interior is mostly metal framing, tools pinned to the walls and a hefty crank taking up most of the floor space, rising a solid couple of feet of the floor. A motorbike, untouched for decades, is propped next to it, dust staining the black finish and rot eating at the leather seat. It’s the sort of thing she reckons Tommy would have plenty to say about - exposed engine she assumes looked mighty stylish before all the rust, and twin exhaust pipes stacked on either side.
It’s not until she has taken a few steps further inside that she catches the dried blood stains creeping around the floor by the rear wheel, so old that layers of dirt make it hard to distinguish in the faint light. She unholsters her gun fluidly, near silent in her approach as she rounds the crank. She’s dimly aware she’s the first thing to breathe in this room in years, but clicks the revolver’s hammer and softens her footsteps anyway, breathing slow and practised as she turns the corner.
The corpse is old - seven years, perhaps. He sits crumpled in the slim space between the motorbike and raised crank with his legs outstretched down the gap, chin slumped into his chest. The upper half of his skull has been blown off, fractures shattering the bone down to his jaw, flesh gnawed away by time and flies. His bone hands cradle the shotgun in his lap, the end of the barrel jaggedly sawed off; the leather of his belt is loose around a decomposed waistline and rotting trousers.
In all fairness, it’s unlikely she looks much better. Her hoodie moves stiffly against her body, crusted in layers of dried blood, and the collars of her two jackets brush cheekbones she’s been able to feel hollowing the last few months. She tries not to think about the grime across her skin left to fester under her winter clothes for weeks now.
Ellie holsters her gun and crouches before him. She waits a respectful couple of seconds before her hands find the inside pocket of his coat, rustling the blue plaid fabric.
“Sorry, buddy.”
She leaves the moulded mints tucked against his ribcage, but pockets three loose shotgun shells and a tin of matchsticks - nine of them, looking dry enough to strike. She thumbs over the gun, but sets it back after seeing the corrosion eating holes in the barrels.
There is no note, nothing for her to remember him as other than the corpse with the mints, and she thinks it’s an awfully polite way to shoot yourself, when you leave nothing to make noise once you’re gone.
She considers moving the body, hauling him outside into the snow, but exhaustion bites at her shoulders as it always does these days, and she leaves him to rot. She collects hammers off the walls and a particularly large wrench she can imagine smashing some fucker’s brains out with - she loops them into her pack quickly and leaves the room to its darkness, closing the door behind her.
The wind rumbles outside, wheezing through the shattered window - she starts heaving a rack of shelves over, dropping her gear on the way. It works well enough, the planks on the floor stacked to block the cracks in the frame that the cold still seeps through. She shoulders the other set of shelves against the windows lining the front entrance, clearing the floor space; tries not to think about the last time snow fell, when she lay alongside a warm body under thick sheets - fails.
She unloads her pack, stares at her cloth bound rations, the smoked deer and dried up rabbit. Counts her berries, her matchsticks, lays them all in neat rows next to her pack; props her bow and rifle against the wall, chooses the least damp patch possible in their honour. She tucks the watch with the shattered face in her inside pocket, checks for the pendant around her neck; curls up on the tiles with the familiar steel of her revolver an icy cold against her fingers, even through her gloves.
She contemplates peaceful death as the snow starts to fall.
Still dreaming. Maybe I always will.
Bones are fucking aching, cold and something more I think. Fuck knows.
I shut the door on him. Nice finding something dead I didn’t gotta shoot first. Didn’t feel right leaving the door open, coming and going past him like he wasn’t brainless - didn’t feel right barricading the door either. Think maybe the cold’s getting me all superstitious and shit.
The first few days are an adjustment period. The blizzard lasts four nights, the snow climbing up the visible windows of the store front. She watches gas pumps drown in white blankets for entertainment, counts the trees visible.
She only stands from her spot on the floor a few times, checking for footsteps when the barrage lessens for a few hours. It’s mostly paranoia, she is aware, the feeling of eyes in the treeline made worse with the close space and illusion of walls closing in; but it’s not wholly unfounded - she’s most likely to encounter strangers now than the rest of the winter.
Every spring in Jackson they found thawing corpses as the snow melted, sometimes as little as a half mile from the walls - anyone this far into the forest will die within a few days.
She assigns herself tasks: takes apart each gun and uses oil from the garage to clean them, chips dried blood off the barrels with her nails and takes stock of every round. She notes the numbers in her journal, diagrams to accompany each; cleans and sharpens each re-used arrow, remembers the first time she shot a man with one, years ago, and how the slickened fletching smeared blood in her hair.
It’s a painful boredom, a caging one, where she wakes from dreams gasping for air, crawling against the wall in the pitch black and waiting for daylight that brings with it nothing but counting rations and chewing old meat.
One night she dreams of Joel’s face splitting itself open inside an astronaut helmet, blood smearing the visor red, so much of it that cracks web from the corners and the glass begins to splinter, bone visible and eye sockets gaping, but smiling all the same.
She wakes up unable to breathe, hyperventilating and shaking - her fingers scream in pain, nothing but stumps when she reaches for them with her other hand, cradled to her chest. She clings to the revolver but doesn’t have the strength to kick herself against the wall, legs numb from the cold and the fear. She pants into the dirt of the tile beneath her, for long enough that when her wheezing finally evens out her spit has visibly pooled in the faint moonlight, and when she can at last roll onto her back, expanding her lungs to the walls of her ribcage, there’s no relief left to feel.
Fuck, she hates winter.
After just under a week, the sky is finally clear. It’s temporary, Ellie knows, but freedom feels beautiful nevertheless.
She shoulders the shelves aside, bow in hand the moment her feet crunch through the snow. It reaches her mid-thigh, much too high to wander far or find any impressive game, but tolerable for a few hours.
She keeps the gas station in eyesight, settles below a pine where the white blanket barely brushes her knee, and watches the trees around her - thick layers of snow firming on branches, ice glinting in the cracks of the bark, and- birds.
Three of them, small and brown, their profiles elegant with the sleek curve of their necks and ballooning of feathers past the wings. Ellie stretches the stiffness of her shoulders and holds steady; lines her sights carefully and catches how the wind brushes her hair left just so slightly.
The arrow buries itself clean in the neck of the largest, its companions fleeing in a flapping of wings as it drops from the branch. It takes minutes for Ellie to trudge over, collect it from its blood splattered dent in the white blanket and remove the arrow.
She lights her first fire in weeks that afternoon, dry wood beaten off shelves inside for tinder, tucked by the exposed broken window. She plucks feathers off with her nails and piles them for arrows, snaps its head in a clean motion - it cooks easily as the sun sets, left to char as the wood smokes. When it gets too dark she kicks out the embers, rolling the ashes out the window where they seethe in the chill, while she gnaws through reddened meat eagerly. The feet crunch and the bones are brittle, scratching her gums until she spits them out, but the heat is so foreign it makes her feel ill as it warms her throat, and she sleeps heavy under the open window as the last of the smoke escapes.
The storms come frequently, without fail. The most she gets between them is three days of clear skies before the weather returns and she is caged within again. She builds figures out of bird bone, using her nail to chip indents in the brittle white and mourning, not for the first time, the loss of her knife.
She dreams of Nora, sometimes - one of those names she feels might be etched into her flesh and visible only once she’s dead and the skin has rotted and peeled back far enough. The dreams are closer to memory than imagination; how she died with bone splintering her organs and teeth missing, her spirit leeched in a few minutes. Ellie wakes up those days and watches the morning crack buttery light through the upper shafts of the window; hearing nothing but screams.
She cleans the flint wheel of her lighter, returns it to the shadows of her rucksack, fuel too precious to be left in the gaps of sunlight.
Almost three dozen days of winter have been marked in her journal when she finds a burrow beneath a tree nearby, sheltered from the northern winds and crusting with ice. It’s empty, soil damp as she digs her fingers around inside. Small plants shoot from within, the first she’s seen in weeks - they’re a light green, fuzz glittering with small crystals from where they emerge underground. Wild mint, the kind Dina boiled and seeped and made into teas and paste, left to dangle in cloth wraps from the windowsills, accompanied by constant complaints about the hard earth killing her flowers.
Ellie runs her thumb up the stem, peeling the leaves into her palm. She kills two birds the same day, but the mint is her most bountiful catch all week, she knows.
She ties them in cloth, gently twines the torn stems around one another, and hangs them in the dark how she’d watched be done dozens of times before.
She dreams of David, his leer revealing bloody teeth, gore seeping from between gums, arm reaching with no blade to protect her this time. She awakes to rage, the most familiar kind, and gnaws at her knuckles to stop the screaming, the beating of her fist into the walls until her fingers split.
She draws the trees outside, over and over, and the lines slowly straighten as her hands cease their shaking.
The mint dries - Dina was right, as always - shrivels and stiffens until it resembles what Ellie remembers, memory feeling years older than it is. It takes weeks to happen, during which she spends hours cleaning a jar she finds under the till, chipping at the solid layer of grime with her fingernail and bird bones until she washes it with snow. She dries it as well as she can with her shirt, leaves upside down in the sunlight for good measure.
Ellie organises her leaves gently, taping the jar airtight when done. It goes at the bottom of her pack, alongside a watch and her lighter.
She gets ill, the first time in two winters now. Wakes to a scratching at her throat and wheezing breath, whole body trembling and dizzy.
She doubles her ration portions, knows she’ll regret it later; gnaws on dried deer meat with drooping eyes, drinks knowing she might not have the strength to unblock the window next time she needs to refill her water supply. Draws herself inwards in the corner furthest from the draught and shakes, hands pressed to her ribs.
By the second day, consciousness is slipping as the shaking worsens. Her skin burns, her bones are cold, her missing fingers scream for her help from the ocean she left them in, hundreds of miles away. She huddles inwards, clings to the fabric of her jacket and chews her own tongue, annoyed to learn that death could, in fact, be quieter than the Mint Man’s next door.
She dreams of Joel, in the way she learns feverish dreams feel a touch too real for her liking. Opens her eyes in her gas station prison and finds him crouched against the wall opposite.
It isn’t him, she knows - his voice isn’t quite the same, somehow off without her being able to place what; her memory stale from the years without it. He lacks the lines at the eyes he had when he died - younger, like when they first met and she’d never met a person so angry.
“You ain’t killed nobody in a long time, Kiddo.” His accent drawls, chin lifting with a challenge she doesn’t understand. He wears a green shirt, not the one he died in, and must have trimmed his beard in the last couple of days.
“I know.” She wants to say, tries to utter, because it must have been months now and the itch was begging for a scratching, but her teeth chatter and mince the words.
“I don’t think you’re much of a kid now-a-days, anyhow.”
“Please.” She lies on the floor with words lodged in her throat and tries to beg him - what for, she doesn’t know, not coherent enough to register.
He watches her, tilts his head in a slight nod, and stares silently as she fights her blurring vision. He’s wearing his watch, she notices, reflecting notes of light from outside, and she knows he’s not there, the watch buried in the bag by her feet, but, fuck, she thinks, as the tears burn, he looks real.
She forces the dried berries down her throat, hunched over her pack for the support her arms fail to provide. The chewing is mechanical, the sourness on her tongue bringing bile to the back of her throat; she feels her ribs heave with the effort to breathe steady.
She has no medicine, carries so little of it usually that it would be of little help anyway. Rubbing alcohol and threading bandages mock her from the bottom of her pack. She chokes the food down, spits the acid between her teeth. Thinks it might be bloody, metallic in the light, but lowers herself too soon after to look closely. Can’t lift herself back up.
She shudders, heat burning every inch of skin though her breath clouds in front of her. Joel still hasn’t put his jacket on - isn’t he cold?
He’s fiddling with something - those small whittling knives he used to carry in a folded leather kit, used to craft figurines and dinosaurs for her with them. Used to leave them out for her, even those years they didn’t talk all that much, oiled wooden people with horns and weapons and eyepatches.
She can’t tell if he looks at her, across the room, his jeans clean where hers are soaked and frozen up to the knee from the snow outside. Can’t remember if his brows were always so low, his eyes always so dark and hard to read.
Can’t remember why they didn’t talk all that much those years, just knows her heart is doing that aching thing where its splits so wide she’s sure its leaking through the gaps in its cage.
Tears stream so hot she’s certain they scorch her cheeks, pooling in the cracks between the tiles she rests her head on. She has that tugging feeling she’s been in a similar position before, and the though brings on a new wave of shivers in her delirium.
So cold.
A soft hand, warmth, brushes her cheek as she trembles in and out of consciousness - it tucks hair behind her ear, smooths the pad of a thumb under her eye. It relaxes the crease between her brows, tender. Smells like jasmine and vanilla, and she hears herself mumble into the familiar comfort.
“Ellie.”
She grunts phlegm, curls further inwards. Let her sleep, she wants to beg - she can finally sleep, don’t they understand?
“I’m sorry.” Dina says, and she’s heard that before, the urgency, the splitting sympathy, she’s heard it before-
Her eyes open and Dina is gone; the cold is thick and tight around her neck and stray hair blurs her vision. Joel-
Joel is opposite, sprawled across the floor the same way he was when she saw this happen the first time, blood fracturing his face. His eyelids are heavy - she watches them close; watches his fingers twitch as the blood that pools beneath him, enough to seep through his clothes and chill his skin - is he not cold yet? - spreads and spreads closer to her.
She wants to scream, wants to yell, but the words won’t come, just thick coughs that spit onto the tiles between them.
“Get up.”
When the fever finally breaks she wakes up wheezing, the grief so heavy on her chest she swears it’s sunk through to her spine. She chokes on her words, the empty room and silence outside the closest to comfort she’s come in what is surely almost a year now.
“Come back.” She wants to say, wants to plead with her own ghostly huffs of breath in the room - “I need you.” She stays silent, sobbing with no tears until she retches, teeth gnawing the unspoken words until they are soft enough for swallowing.
Fever broke. Haven’t felt this weak in years. Don’t think there’ll be much more snow this season - must have been a couple of months by now. When it hits a week of clear skies I’ll pack up.
Dreamt he was peeling off skin from ankle to knee - skinned alive. Shook so hard I spilt most my water, can feel it freezing through my gloves right now.
Keep seeing people in the snow - not real, I know. They just stand under the trees and stare at me.
I’ve been here too fucking long.
Trying not to
think about the people back home.Not to think about the people back in Jackson. Hoping the kid’s not sick in the cold.
Ellie is still exhausted when she hears the first movement outside all winter.
She’s gnawing at an old protein bar, years stale within its airtight packaging - she found it before she was even out of California, a ground floor office where she impaled the first clicker with a chair leg and the second, a fire axe. She had been saving it for an emergency and, with a handful of berries shrivelled noticeably smaller than they were when first sourced, and a twining and a half of tough rabbit left, it was feeling pretty fucking dire.
The sky is clear, that blue so bright it’s near blinding first thing each morning. She’s chewing through a conservative bite of old oat when she hears the distant crunch and sinking of snow outside.
She freezes, feels her brow crease in concentration, focuses on the repetitive, if mighty slow, footsteps moving closer to the outside of the wall behind her.
She knows it’s near impossible for infected to catch her near prone on the floor through mostly boarded windows with their eyesight, recognises the grunting and little whimpers with each step, knows it won’t be a human. She still lowers her breakfast in silence, reaches for her nearest gun - pistol - in a slow motion. Sits back on her haunches against the wall, hears the fucker move further along the wall.
She sees it through the glass when it rounds the gas station, snow up to its knees, dragging at its already limping gait. Ice crusts on its shoulders, the lower half of its jaw missing, and its arm drags across the glass store front as it passes - the heavy thump is the loudest noise Ellie has heard in days. It makes her flinch, gun held at her front.
It’s missing all its fingers save the thumb - frostbite, Ellie assumes. It moans as it moves past, maybe as much as they usually do, or maybe there’s enough awareness left to recognise the missing limbs, the swollen and frosted stumps.
She does not kill it - stays tense and waiting as it moves past and away, long out of ear shot when she rises to her feet, stretches, immediately sinks back down as the dizziness overwhelms her.
She spends the days alert from then on, listening for more - as the snow melts and the river ice thaws, the mountain paths will clear: they migrate from the north every spring, passing Jackson. Closest to hordes the fuckers move in, just following the bird paths and the sleepy wildlife still sleepy from hibernation - easy food for starved fungus.
She eats, tallies her rations, watches the sky and follows cloud patterns; wishes she’d listened more to Jesse’s spiels on weather tracking.
Going east soon. Cities out that way - more supplies. Low on rounds, need a new knife. Everywhere out here is picked bare. Casper’s a fairly straight path, this road’ll pick up onto the highway soon enough.
Can’t head north - fucking infected’ll be moving soon, not risking walking directly into them if I time it wrong. Can’t face Jackson yet, either.
The map she looted from a collapsed truck as she crossed back into Wyoming months ago is now spread in front of her. Route 26; good tree cover throughout, she assumes - take her a month on foot, leaving time for inevitable detours. She’s unlikely to meet stragglers until she crosses through towns, and she’s fairly certain most have been picked clean and swept by Tommy’s lot within the last few years. Not many bandits roaming to the western borders, infected following the fresh ice melt moving south - her finger follows where the highway runs parallel with a series of creeks and lakes; national parks are listed on the left of the map key, dirt trails dotting them.
Could really do with a goddamn horse.
Terrain shouldn’t be too much of a problem, not after Seattle’s flooded streets.
People, on the other hand…
That fucking bite.
She hadn’t singed it off yet, didn’t want to risk the blood loss in the cold, pressed against her mangled gloves all winter. But heading into a city? It would be a real problem, real soon.
She gives herself until the sun is fully above her, no shadows casted across the thinning snow outside, to prepare herself. Tears cloth from the inner lining of her jacket, reckons it’s cleaner than her shirt; lays it on the tile in front of her, melting ice and the last of her canteen contents soaking it.
She removes her outer jacket, his jacket, for the first time in months; the thinner one below joins it in a pile. That one, she’d retrieved from a hunter whose leg she hacked off before she crossed into Utah. He’d bled out in the hours she spent in the floors above handling his friends, and by the time she returned he was taking his last breaths. She rolls the sleeves of her hoodie, taken from the Farm - watches the hairs on her arm rise to greet the cold.
She unties Dina’s bracelet for the first time in months, fumbling with the knot without her last two fingers to pinch it in place; tucks it under her jackets, gentle.
She offers a silent prayer to anything watching as she splays her palm flat on the tile and drizzles rubbing alcohol over the fleshy, outer muscle. The bite is growing older now, the skin scarred over and mutilated, harden warps of flesh wrapping around her inner palm. The shiny skin twists around the white bite scar, distorting the stumps above - it itches, usually, and flares up now it’s exposed to the freezing air.
She balances the matchstick between her knees, tightened and held upright. Her right hand strikes her lighter - once; twice - before the flame flickers. She hovers it to the match, flicking the zippo shut and sliding it away when done.
Fuck.
She picks up the match from where it was lodged, holds it inches over her doused left hand, still pressed firm to the tiles. Her raised hand shakes. Hears nothing but ringing and Dina’s lecturing in her ears.
Fuck.
She takes a slow, deep breath; watches the flame burn an inch of the thin wood, and drops it onto her doused hand.
Immediately, fire catches.
She screams through gritted teeth, a guttural sound. The agony travels through her arm, needles prickling from her shoulder to her neck, forearm white hot. Her fingers contort with reflex, twitching under the heat; the blue fury.
Her view of her own hand blurs, the temperature warping the air, though the tears blurring her eyes may be responsible. She feels trapped, claustrophobic with the pain, watching her skin singe and pulse.
She lasts the seconds she forces herself to count, throat splitting with the ferocity of her cries - curls her working hand around the cloth - the sweet, cool cloth - and pins it to the flames. There is a hiss, steam rising thick and sudden. She can hear her own skin sizzle, can feel the fresh wound pulse beneath the damp compress; chokes on a yelp as her body folds in on itself, tasting her own burnt flesh in the air she forces down.
Deep, heaving breaths; shoulders shaking and sweat dripping off her forehead, pattering audibly on the tile alongside a smearing of charred skin and blood, a rusty paste thick below her hand.
“Motherfucker.” She grunts, exhales wheezing around the word.
She drags herself, her numbing arm, through the window; buries her hand in snow until the cold bites as bad as the burn and she can’t tell which element is spiting her the most. Wraps bandages with a shaking hand, knowing cleaning the raw flesh in the morning will set off a new wave of agony. She sleeps with her jackets wrapped around her, too sensitive to slip her hand through the layers of stiffened fabric.
The dreams come in violent fits - countless molotovs thrown, eyeballs melting into their sockets and cheeks singed off the bone. Nora, looking up at her with an ear torn off, gore smearing across her unhinged jaw; fire, the kind that makes her feel fourteen with a machete in hand again, heat suffocating as he wheezes his last breaths beneath her - more blood than man.
It heals slowly. The bandages are sticky with blood and the slimy pus that oozes from the harshest tears in skin - it spreads across part of her palm, though her remaining fingers and the flesh of her thumb are untouched. The back of her hand is worst, gnarled skin that wrinkles and peels away when she touches it, spreading up the knob of outer wrist bone, sprawling across to the knuckle of her forefinger.
She cleans with the rubbing alcohol in the morning, soothes with the whitest snow she can find and pats dry with the cleaner side of the used bandages. Lets them breathe for a few hours before wrapping, wishes she paid more attention to Dina’s lectures as she stares at the sticky fluid pooling between the deeper cracks of blood, smearing across her palm.
The pain reduces to an aching within a few days, the sharp pains becoming rarer and the wound drying as the corners scab. Her fingers could curl most of the way to her palm now, and she ties extra fabric around the wrist to prevent chafing where her jacket sleeves cuff under.
The bandages rub and irritate her until she remembers countless late nights leaning over the sink, Dina perched on the bathtub edge with a needle beneath her skin, and then it hurts in a wholly different way.
Leaving tomorrow. Snow’s only a few inches off the ground and weather was above freezing yesterday. Not waiting any longer and chancing a fucking horde.
Wonder how hard Tommy’d laugh if he could’ve seen me setting my own goddamn self on fire.
Need a knife real soon. Haven’t been this antsy since Boston.
She draws the Mint Man in her torchlight, morbid as it is. Spends time detailing the angles of his fingers, nothing but bone now, and adjusts his shirt collar before she leaves. She tries to capture the bike alongside him, but the proportions spiral and she gives up, blocking the space beside him black instead.
When the sun rises she collects her pack and vaults the window, ice crunching beneath her. The white expanse is cast buttery yellow in the morning light, bird calls softened with distance - the trees are snow-capped and vast, green pines looming over her as she makes for the road. Nothing but forest beyond, Jackson Town to her back and Route 26 a brief walk away.
She pauses, scuffs her shoes on the concrete below as she hits cracked tarmac - the gravel gives, almost slush in the melting ice. There’s a reassurance to the weight slung over her shoulder, the holster heavy at her hip.
She survives winter and leaves the gas station behind.