Archive of Our Own ^beta

October
From her vantage point atop the wall, Ellie can just make out the edge of the sea of Infected. She watches, the wind biting her cheeks, her knuckles stretched tight over the muzzle of her rifle, as the swarm below her undulates, a ripple traveling across the surface of it, a pulse point spiraling out from the base of the wall. Disintegrating bodies have plastered themselves there, fingers digging into the cracks between the stockade pillars, reaching for the tantalizing whiff of life just behind them. A shattered moan rises from somewhere in the middle of the sea: another Infected succumbing to the cold, to the call of the underground network, begging them to lay down, to bolster themselves against the coming winter.

“It’s what they do,” Joel’d told her once. “When it gets cold. They can’t get on well in these temperatures, so they’ll huddle up and hunker down and feed themselves off the mycelium underground till springtime. Till it all thaws out.”

She’d thought it was silly then. What sort of predator lays down and takes its stripes and gives up? But it was less silly now that they were fixing to do that along their wall, around her home- and it was her fault.

Three weeks ago she’d left home in the middle of the night, furious at Joel, determined to teach him a lesson. She’d come across the horde as it made it’s way down Miller Butte Pass and when she’d fled homeward, terrified and pressed on by the need to warn her people, they’d followed.

And then- they’d stayed.

“You’re gonna freeze to death if you stay up here much longer.”

Ellie startles, turns. Dina, bundled up in a wool lined corduroy jacket and a scarf, the tip of her nose pinks, smirks at her as she trots up the remaining stairs to Ellie’s station. She holds out her hands expectantly, and Ellie passes her the rifle. “There’s some movement on the north eastern sector,” she says. “Keep an eye on it.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Dina says, but her dark eyes are glittering with mischief. Ellie rolls her eyes and knocks shoulders with her as she starts for the stairs. “Joel’s looking for you,” she adds, and Ellie huffs, sticks her hands in the pockets of her coat, and jogs down the stairs.

In the weeks since the arrival of the horde, the scape of Jackson’s changed dramatically. There’s no more movie nights, no more Sunday afternoon flea market in the square, no more packs of kids running helter-skelter through the streets. It’s late October and no one’s said a damned word about the annual Halloween party. Lights go out after sundown, and every night they barricade their doors and prop sheets of plywood or close storm shutters over their downstairs windows, a flimsy barrier in case of an infiltration. Silent and dark was the new rule.

“Our best chance of survival is waiting them out,” Lyle Canron, one of the council members, had told them when they gathered together in the old church, the day after the horde’s appearance. “We don’t have the ammo to kill ‘em off, and the noise’ll rile them up anyways. Better we hunker down and wait for them to get bored or catch wind of something better and head off.”

But they hadn’t. They’d stayed, milling in a steady circle around the walls like a castle moat in a children’s fairy tale. They’d stayed, and tensions had begun to fray as the days trickled on, fraught with terror and punctuated by the cries of the Infected. The air was constantly rife with the scent of their rot, and the town’s animals had been worked into such a state of distress over the proximity of the predators that a couple goats had had heart attacks and dropped dead.

Jackson’s changed, Ellie muses as she heads down the road towards home, and it’s all her fault.

*

There’s trouble brewing.

Ellie scents it as she turns the corner onto Rancher Street. Before she even sees the men standing on her porch, their backs stiff with tension, she can sense the shifting of boundaries in the air like a panther tasting the scent of it’s prey on the wind. She slows when she comes around the bend in the road where the sycamore tree droops, shaggy leaves touching the ground, and stops when she spies the cluster of people on her steps. There’s four men there, all of them dressed in faded winter jackets and sporting bushy beards. Ellie picks them apart as she approaches. Trent Freedman and Ronnie Bush. The Colewell brothers, Terry and Leo. They don’t even glance at her as she slips through the gate and starts across her own front yard.

Joel’s on the porch in front of them, arms folded over his wide chest, jaw set. He’s looking worse for the wear these days, and today’s no exception: the bruises beneath his eyes are plum colored and puffy, and his beard’s looking a little more wiry than he normally likes it to get. He’s dressed like he’s just stepped outside real quick- no jacket, and the edges of his rolled up sleeves are damp - but the beds of his nails are a cool lavender, so Ellie reckons he’s been out here for a while now, and he’s freezing.

He cuts his eyes to her as she approaches, and Trent, the one running his mouth, glances her way, falls abruptly quiet, but not before Ellie hears him say, “- put it to a vote if we have to -” He coughs, and the other three men catch sight of her, school their expressions into something less - steely than they were a second ago. Ellie’s skin begins to crawl.

“Afternoon,” Trent says to her, and she nods jerkily, pauses. The Colewell brothers shuffle aside and she mounts the steps in between them, suppressing a shudder when her arms brush theirs. The sudden silence hanging over the five men feels weighty, loaded, one sparked charge away from combustion. Ellie pauses beside Joel.

“What’s going on?”

Joel glances at her, but only just. He jerks his head behind him, to the door he’s standing guard in front of. “Go inside.”

Her heart picks up speed. She doesn’t move. “Joel-”

“Go get Rafa ready for dinner,” he says in that voice of his. He’s got an asshole voice, Ellie’d told the brothers in Kansas City, and while a lot’s changed since then, this one thing hasn’t:

Joel Miller is an asshole when he’s being threatened, and he’s being threatened now.

“Ellie,” Joel says sharply, and she shakes herself, slips around behind him and through the door. Her stomach churning, she pauses in the hallway, casting around for something she can use, something she can give to Joel to defend himself with-

“Lee!”

Three year old Rafa comes bounding out of the living room, a Lego creation clutched in his hand, and Ellie moves without thinking it through. She scoops him up, settles him against the point of her hip, and goes back outside.

“- they ain’t gonna like what happens if-”

She boots the door open so hard that it smacks Joel. He turns, startled, and she ducks around him, past Trent with his big fucking mouth open and the others with their eyes dark and sharp, beetle bright in the riotous tumble of the sunset, and plops down on the porch swing.

Joel turns to her with what she can only describe as thinly veiled impatience. “Ellie,” he says, his voice as stern as she’s ever heard it, “Take him inside.”

Ellie ignores him. She heaves her legs up onto the seat of the swing and jostles Rafa around till he’s straddling her stomach, giggling. Joel says, “Ellie.”

She says, “Rafa wanted to come out.”

Rafa argues, “No!”

She shushes him. Mindful of the eyes trained on her, she plucks the Lego creation from Rafa’s fingers and holds it up above her head. “Dude, what’s this?”

“I made Mommy,” Rafa crows proudly, and someone’s boots shift on the steps. Someone else clears a throat.

“Reckon we oughtta- take this conversation somewhere else,” Ronnie Bush says. There’s an edge to his voice that sends a shiver of apprehension skating down Ellie’s spine. She refuses to even glance at them- these fucking men, standing on her porch and trying to intimidate Joel fucking Miller- when she asks, cooly, loudly:

“Hey- do you know if Clem’s finished with Ender’s Shadow yet?” Surprised silence greets her. Ellie goes on, blithely, “She said she’d lend it to me when she’s done but that was fucking forever ago.”

Ronnie, Clem’s uncle, coughs. He sounds embarrassed when he replies, “I, uh - I don’t know.”

She has him where she wants him. Ellie cranes her neck to peer around the arm of the swing at the four men standing on her porch. “Do you think you could ask her? She mighta forgotten.”

The tips of Ronnie’s ears are red. Ellie reckons its not from the cold. “I could - do that.”

Ellie smiles, sharp and bright and only a little bit feral. “Thanks!”

The men stand in silence a second. Ellie turns her attention back to Rafa, prying Lego Maria’s head from her body. “Dude- you’re destroying her!”

“I don’t like her,” Rafa declares sadly, and behind her, Ellie feels the tension begin to bleed a slow, cold death.

“I guess we oughtta head home,” Trent says at last. “Nightfall soon.”

“You do that.” Joel’s voice is clipped, dangerous. Asshole, Ellie thinks, and smirks.

The men leave awkwardly, quickly. At the gate, Terry Colewell pauses, turns back. “You pass our message along, now,” he says in a tone that Ellie does not like at all. She scrambles to sit up and the swing sways violently, chain links clinking.

“Tell your mom we said hi back,” she calls, and then Joel’s there, snatching Rafa off of her as their front gate slams shut, echoing across their darkening yard.

“Get your ass inside,” he says in fond exasperation, and Ellie does as he says.

In the house, Ellie takes Rafa into the kitchen while Joel goes around shutting the storm shutters. She listens to the clatter and groaning of them while she washes Rafa’s hands and settles him at the table and begins serving bowls of the potato soup Joel’s got simmering on the stove. It’s the same thing they had last night, she remembers, and the night before. But she’s a FEDRA brat, so she’s not about to complain about hot food, no matter how repetitive it is. She’s just sitting at the table with her own bowl when Joel enters. He drops a kiss to the crown of her head, then Rafa’s.

“Thank you, baby.”

She shrugs, scoops up a chunk of steaming yellow potato into the ladle of her spoon. “What happened to fungus ain’t that smart?”

Joel blinks at her, confused. “What now?”

“That’s what you said when we were camping out after Bill’s,” she explains. She blows across the surface of her spoonful of stew, watches ribbons of steam curl away from it and dissipate. “About lighting the fire. Fungus aren’t going to care about the smoke. So why are we doing all this?” She waves her hand over her head in a circle, indicating the shuttered windows and pulled curtains, the lights turned low. “They care about light but not smoke?”

Joel grunts. Rafa overturns his spoon above the table top, and hot broth splashes across the wood grain. Joel reaches for him with a sigh, replies, “Ain’t about the fungus, Ellie. Hoards like that tend to attract the attention of others.”

Ellie feels a chill raze her spine. “You mean like - FEDRA?”

Joel’s lips thin. He takes Rafa’s hand and rearranges his little fingers around the stem of the spoon. “Hold it like this, mijo,” he says, and Rafa beams at him. To Ellie, he goes on, “Yeah. Or any groups in the area. Just - trying to keep what we got here under wraps to anyone lookin’ on.”

“That doesn’t really help during the day,” Ellie points out, and Joel sighs. He eats a spoonful of soup, chewing.

“Yeah, we know.” He swallows. Rafa scrambles onto his knees, leans over his bowl, and blows on the surface so fiercly that he ends up spitting everywhere. Joel sighs; Ellie cackles. “Rafa, honey - sit down.”

Rafa sits. He bangs his spoon on the edge of the table. “It’s not a perfect solution,” Joel tells Ellie, reaching for Rafa’s spoon. “But it’s better than nothing right now.”

After dinner, Ellie showers and then heads downstairs with her copy of His Dark Materials. The lights are all off, and the living room is cast in a sepia tone by the flickering light of the fire. Ellie stretches out in front of it with a blanket and throw pillow, and she’s not surprised when Joel deposits Rafa there a few minutes later, dressed in Cookie Monster footie pajamas, clutching his stuffed bear. “When’s Tommy and Maria getting back?” She asks, tucking Rafa down into her side, and Joel stands, rubbing at his lower back with a wince.

“Soon, I reckon,” he replies, and she means to wait up for them, but the next thing she knows, she’s blinking slowly into the darkened living room. She’s still on the floor, and Rafa’s nestled into her with his leg thrown over her stomach and his dark curls shining amber in the light thrown by the smoldering embers of the fire. In the kitchen, a candle flame shudders, casts long shadows across the striped hardwood floor of the hallway. Ceramic clinks; the low rumble of Tommy and Joel’s voice meld with the lighter timbre of Maria’s. Ellie tucks her face into the top of Rafa’s head and listens.

“- Colewell brothers are assholes,” Tommy scoffs. He slurps, and Joel answers, his voice sharp:

“Don’t mean we should just ignore them. They’re mad. Reckon most of the folks around here are.”

“They’re bullies,” Tommy points out.

“They showed up at our home,” Joel says. There’s an edge of asshole in his voice again. “While I had the kids. Alone. They -”

His voice cuts out. Maria asks, steely, seething, “Do you really think they were going to do something?” She’s not mocking him, Ellie realizes; she trusts Joel, trusts his intuition. “Joel?”

“Maybe,” Joel admits. Ellie feels that thrill that she did earlier- the electric tingle of anticipation, the rising slosh of fear in her belly. She holds her breath, and Joel goes on, “I don’t know. Felt that way.”

Silence permeates the house. Ellie listens to the wind in the branches of the beech tree outside, to the snapping of the dying fire, the long, even in and out of Rafa’s breath. In the kitchen, spoons scrape the sides of bowls. Maria says, “I’ll bring it up to the council tomorrow. They - it was a majority vote. If people are angry, they need to bring to us through the proper channels.”

“I know that,” Joel tells her gruffly. “But they ain’t. Something’s gotta be done. I’m not - they came here. I had Ellie and Rafa with me. They- they try that shit again, they’re leavin’ in sacks, you hear me?”

“Good,” Maria says stoutly. Tommy makes a sound of agreement. In her arms, Rafa stirs. Ellie presses her lips to his forehead, soothes him the way she’s seen Tommy and Maria and Joel do a thousand times. “You do what you need to. I won’t fault you or anyone for that.”

“You say something tomorrow.”Joel’s voice leaves no room for disagreement. Maria huffs.

“They threatened my family as well, you know,” she says drily, dangerously. “Trust me on this, Joel.”

A long silence. Then, Joel grunts. “Y’all stayin’ here tonight? Guest room’s done up.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says. “I’m not goin’ back out there. Fuckin’ freezing.”

The adults lapse into silence. Ellie blinks up at the ceiling, trying to dislodge the pull of sleep on her eyes, but soon she succumbs and slips back under.

*

She’s not surprised when the next morning at breakfast, Joel tells her she’s coming with him for the day. Maria and Tommy are already gone, Tommy with Rafa clinging to his back piggy back style, and so it’s just the two of them at the table alone, eating their eggs and sourdough and pretending like they can’t hear the moans of the horde even with all the windows closed.

“Because of those guys yesterday?” Ellie asks, and Joel sniffs, nods shortly. He’s not eating, choosing instead to nurse a rapidly cooling mug of chicory coffee. The skin under his eyes is swollen with lack of sleep, and the gray in his hair and beard stand out in illumination in the early morning light. Ellie swallows a bite of dry toast - no butter- and goes on, “You don’t have to worry about those losers.”

“Ellie.”

“I’m not scared of them.”

“Yeah, well, I am.”

Ellie stiffens, startled by his candid expression of fear, but Joel won’t look at her. He finishes his coffee in one long slurp, his throat bobbing, and stands. “Hurry up. Got places to be, kiddo.”

She decides against arguing and does as she’s told, cramming an entire triangle of toast into her mouth, and soon enough they’re out the door, both of them dressed in their boots and coats; Ellie leaves her unzipped till Joel snaps at her to do it up. She does, rolling her eyes. The sunshine is long reaching but shallow; pools of shadow linger in the stairwells of the houses they pass, beneath the eaves of roofs and porches. Ellie tries to match pace with Joel, jogging a little to catch up. “Where’re we going?”

“Inventory,” he says shortly, and Ellie throws back her heads, groans at the sky.

Jackson is muted as they pass through it towards the community pantry. Most people are spending all their time inside their homes now. A lot of the stuff that kept their community going - foraging and hunting, fishing and patrolling, even the harvest - has ground to a halt in the wake of the arrival of the horde. There’s no getting in or out of the gates. The neighbors they pass are quiet, scurrying from place to place with their heads down. Everyone’s armed now, even Ellie. The weight of her handgun on her hip does little to comfort her though, not with the putrid scent of rot lying so heavily on the air and the constant blundering shuffle of the horde against the walls.

In the community pantry, Joel takes a notepad from his jacket pocket and tears off a sheet. He hands it to Ellie. “Start at the dry goods,” he tells her, and she groans again.

“Dude, this is your job-”

“Ellie, come on.”

The piece of paper wavers in the air between them. Ellie snatches it and stomps off to the far right corner of the pantry, then has to do a one-eighty and come stomping back when she realizes she doesn’t have a pencil. Joel’s got his hand extended towards her, a pencil pinched between his index finger and thumb. When she swipes at it, he draws it back, too high for her to reach. “Dude!”

“Cool it with the attitude,” he chides. “It’s a hard time for everyone right now.”

She huffs. “I know.”

Joel eyes her a minute longer, then lowers the pencil. She takes it from him and goes back to the corner where she surveys the rows of shelves, loaded with jars of dried beans and lentils and dehydrated fruit. There’s so fucking much of it, and she sets to her task with irritation, copying the labels of the jars onto her paper and then marking tallies for each indivual one. Halfway through her first shelf she’s fucking annoyed.

“You should have fucking told me this is what we were doing,” she calls to Joel, over by the preserves. “I would have brought my Walkman.”

Joel grunts. “You want me to sing for you?”

“Jesus Christ,” she mutters, and Joel barks a laugh.

It takes them the better part of a couple hours to do the whole pantry, and by the the time they leave, the wind coming in off the mountain smells faintly iron with the promise of coming rain, and Ellie’s head’s beginning to hurt from squinting in the dim room for so long. “Why’d we have to do this anyways?” Ellie asks as they head off down the street towards the council house, and Joel, folding their inventory sheets into neat little squares, glances at her.

“Maria asked me to.”

“Okay, why us?”

“Why does it matter? It needed to be done.” Ellie sighs, and Joel rolls his eyes. “Cheer up. We’re gonna go stand on the wall next.”

Ellie begins, “Dude-”

But Joel stops suddenly, his arm extended out in front of her. She stops just short of running into it, startled into silence by the sight of the crowd milling around the gates just ahead, surrounding one of the catwalk staircases, where Lyle Conran and James Calhoun, who runs the wall patrollers, are standing. Ellie’s heart sinks a little when she catches sight of the unruly auburn curls of the Colewell brothers at the front of the crowd. “Joel-”

Joel hushes her, steps back till he’s out of sight of the around the corner of the butcher shop, towing Ellie with him. He very calmly takes the folded over inventory list from his pocket and presses it into Ellie’s hand. “You go on and get this to Maria for me,” he says, quietly, and the hair along the back of Ellie’s neck stands at attention.

“Joel.”

“Go on.” He takes her by the shoulders, spins her around, gives her a little push. “Do as your told, baby.”

She hates when he says that - do as you’re told - and not just because she hates doing what she’s told, but because he always uses that voice: soft and insistent and immovable. It reminds her of Kansas City, him telling her to stay behind him; of North Dakota when they’d come across the hunters and he’d told her to stay down; all the times they’d been in danger and he’d made it clear that her safety was his priority. Which was nice and all, until she’d realized that by that he meant he didn’t care about his.

But when she turns around to argue with him, he’s already gone, loping around the corner towards the crowd in long, easy strides, his hand resting at his hip, on the butt of his gun. A spike of searing fear begins the slow climb up her chest from her stomach. She turns back around and runs.

She takes the back alleys, hopping the fence between the butcher yard and the now silent tannery, scrambling through the furrowed rows of the apothecary’s garden, banging through the gated yards of the preschool and the daycare, both of them empty. She takes the back steps at the council house two at a time, panting, and charges up the stairs to the second floor, where she throws herself through Maria’s office door without invitation. Maria’s inside at her desk, papers spread before her. Jacoby Bearchum and Andrea Zurich, two other members of the council, stand opposite her. They all startle violently when she barges in.

“Ellie!” Maria comes around the desk at her, face creased in concern. “What’s-”

“Trouble at the gates,” Ellie gasps, and Maria reacts swiftly, yanking her coat off the peg next to the door, then picking up her gun from her desk. Jacoby and Andrea do the same, and Maria asks Ellie, stern:

“Is Joel there?”

Ellie nods frantically. Her mouth is dry and her throat burning as the fear begins to feather out across her sternum. She feels like she’s about to choke. She reaches for the doorknob. “He-”

But Maria takes her by the shoulder and tugs her backwards. “Stay here.”

“What?” Ellie cries, turning on her aunt, but Maria shakes her head at her, steely eyed and sharp.

“Don’t argue with me. Lock the door behind us.”

And then they’re gone, the three of them clattering down the stairs. Ellie locks the door with shaking hands, then scurries across the office to the tall windows behind Maria’s desk. She gets there just in time to see Maria and her colleagues spill off of the porch steps and jog down the road towards the gates.

For a long time, nothing happens. Ellie watches the direction of the gates with her breath stacking up in her chest, hot and painful. Nothing happens - lots more people start to trickle that way, but she can’t see what’s going on because the fucking preschool is in the fucking way, and she can’t hear anything because Maria’s windows don’t fucking open. She chews on her nails and she paces and she comes back to the window over and over again, and her vision starts to go a little funny at the edges, all sparkling and dark, so she knows she has to sit down, has to calm down. She plops herself in Maria’s chair, dragging it forward by the tips of her toes till her rib cage is flush with the lip of the desk, and tries to distract herself by reading the paper’s Maria’s got laid out across the desk top.

She’s sort of surprised to see it’s all inventory lists. Heads of cattle is scrawled across the top of a yellow legal pad, and below it, column denote steer and heifers and milk cows and bulls and calves. Another list itemizes sheep by ewe, ram, and lamb. Another seems to be a collective count of all the chickens in Jackson, broken down by household and then added to the communal count. Goats are the shortest list - there’s less than 15 in the township, but below it is an inventory of the town’s freezer, and then the town’s butchery, and then -

Voices suddenly explode across Ellie’s ears. She pushes out of the desk chair and scrabbles to the window. A swell of people are coming around the corner of the preschool from the direction of the wall. Ellie unlocks the door and races downstairs.

She waits on the porch as the streams of people pass by her, all of them with their heads turned in on each others’, their voices low and simmering. Ellie loops her arms around the post of the stairs, cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of them. There were no gunshots, she reminds herself. Nothing to indicate violence. Nothing, save the sticky feeling in her chest and the waves of anger wafting off of the passing townsfolk and the overlying scent of rot and ruin, sordid and earthy on her tongue-

She sees them: Joel and Maria and Jacoby, coming up along the street at the end of the pack, their faces grim. Too late Ellie realizes she hadn’t seen the Colewell brothers pass; she picks her way down the stairs and crashes against the tide of people to reach them. She barrels into Joel and latches on to him before she can second guess herself. He staggers with the force of her assault.

“Hey, now.” He ducks his head, speaks into the crown of her head. His breath is hot on her scalp. “What’s all this for?”

She doesn’t have the right answer - that she was afraid today, afraid in a way that she hasn’t ever been behind these walls, afraid in a way that makes feel ashamed. She shakes her head and buries her face deeper into Joel’s sternum and pretends that she can't hear the cries of the Infected over the beating of his heart.

*

They do their shift on the wall and then they go home at sunset with the clouds scuttling thin and grey across the pale bowl of the sky. They have dinner at Tommy and Maria’s, more vegetable soup, and afterwards, Tommy leaves because he’s got a night time rotation, and Ellie settles herself at the kitchen table with her sketchbook and colored pencils, and Joel goes around and closes all the shutters while Maria puts Rafa to sleep. When she comes back downstairs, her face lined with exhaustion and her sweatshirt splattered with droplets of water, she passes a hand over the back of Elie’s head and asks:

“Tea?”

Ellie agrees. Maria sets the kettle to boil and fixes three mugs with nylon satchets of dried plum and wild berry kernels, and by the time Joel comes wandering in, the fire in the living room hearth calling after him with bright pops and snaps, the tea is ready. Ellie sips hers carefully, her face poised over the steaming mouth of it, cheeks flushed and sweating. She waits for Joel to tell her to knock it off, but he doesn’t even notice. He and Maria are looking over the inventory sheets together and making notes on a yellowed legal pad.

“What’s all that for?”

They startle a little at her question, almost as if they’d forgotten that she was there. Forehead creasing, Joel answers, “Just - trying to get a handle on what we’ve got for resources right now.”

Ellie’s skin prickles. “Why?”

Maria and Joel share a long look, one she knows all too well: they’re trying to figure out how much they can say to her without worrying her. Ellie feels a burning in her chest, that same crackling anger that pushed her out of the gates three weeks ago. “I’m not a - little kid.”

“We know,” Maria placates her. She drums the rubber end of her pencile on the tabletop. Her chin wrinkles, and after a long second, she blows out a mouthful of air, deflating. “We are - concerned that we might not have as easy of a winter season as we have previously.”

Ellie swallows hard. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Maria says quietly, “That the horde has made it difficult for us to prepare for winter. We can’t leave and hunt. The last hardy grain and the gourd harvest is going to be lost because we can’t reach it. We - things may get slim for a few months.”

Ellie’s mouth is dry. She wraps her hands around the warm sides of her mug, chews her bottom lip. Tries to ignore the voice in the back of her head, pinching and mean, clamoring: You did this. You brought them here. “What happened at the gates today?” She asks finally, and Joel sighs. He knots his hands together atop the papers scattered before him, studying them a long minute.

“Some folks’re - unhappy with the way it’s all turned out,” he says slowly. “They think we need to take a more - aggressive approach.”

“But there was a vote,” Ellie points out, and he nods, sharpish.

“There was,” he agrees. “But it wasn’t unanimous. There’s some people who weren’t on the winning side. And they’ve taken to stirrin’ some things up.”

She remembers that shock of cold when she’d come around the corner and saw the four angry men taking up space in her yard. Sullying her space. She rubs the pad of her pointer finger hard against the chalky clay surface of her mug, tries to ground herself in the familiar texture. “Are we safe?”

“Course we are,” Joel says, too quickly. Ellie narrows her eyes at him.

“Why’d they come to you? Yesterday?”

Joel and Maria exchange another of those looks. Maria replies, her voice thin and flat, “They think - they think that the best way to get the attention of those of us who are - well, in charge, I guess, like myself and the other council members, is to go through more… vulnerable avenues, you could say.”

Ellie almost snorts. Almost. “So they picked fucking Joel?”

But Maria’s not laughing, and neither is Joel. They’re gazes linger on her, pulsing and heavy, and she feels the grin fade slowly from her face. Not Joel, she realizes. Maybe he was here, yeah, but their intent was never to threaten him.

She swallows hard. Joel says, soft and stern, “From now on, Ellie, you and Rafa are with us, or your uncle. You understand?”

It’s the sort of ultimatum that usually incites a groan from her, or devolves into an argument. Tonight, it just settles like cold silk over her skin, clinging and insubstational in the face of yet another storm. She nods, agrees. “Alright.”

Joel watches her a second longer, then nods. “Good girl,” he says, and outside, a wail, carried on the rising winds, batters against the walls of their home.

November
The council calls a town meeting a week or so after the incident at the gates, and the entire township crowds into the little clapboard church on Main Street, the lot of them stamping their feet against the cold and rubbing their hands together, pressing in close to each other to pool body heat. That morning, Ellie’d woken to find the world outside shimmering under a thin, crackling layer of hoary frost. The naked branches of the beech tree in their side yard were encased in ice, throwing glittering rainbows across Ellie’s bedroom floor when the sun hit them just right. It’d been pretty, in a dismal sort of way; outside the walls, the horde presses in tighter against the cold, compacting itself to a line of bodies several hundred deep.

In the little church, the council takes the stage. Maria is a the center, bundled in a dark lilac jacket with a knitted wool hat pulled over her braids. In the morning light coruscating though the stained glass window, her skin glows amber and persimmon. Her eyelashes glitter like drops of molten gold. The hollows in her cheeks are basins as deep as the floor of their valley.

They’ve all been looking a little worse for the wear, Ellie thinks, but this is the first time that she gets a chance to see everyone gathered, and the sight of all the slack jaws and the beetled brows and the faces ruddy with cold and weariness sends that thing in her chest fluttering. She leans back into the pew, tips her head against the point of Joel’s shoulder. His hand comes to rest on her knee and stays there, warm and heavy.

“I’m going to cut to the chase here,” Maria tells the room, and a hush falls across it, swift and incadsecnt. “We had hoped to see the colder weather drive away the Infected from our walls, but it hasn’t. In - light of this, myself and our other elected leaders have had to renegotiate the approach we’ve taken so far.”

Silence greets her words, but Ellie feels the swampy tension rise in the air around her. On Tommy’s lap, Rafa squirms, giggles; Tommy hushes him, turns his son’s head into the crook of his arm. Maria goes on:

“We have been monitoring our food supply for the last weeks, and we are - we are not in a position to sustain our population at the rate at which we are consuming our resources.” Murmurs rise, voices sharp and afraid; Maria holds her hands up, palms out, waits patiently for them to settle. “We were not able to get in the last of our bulgar harvest before the swarm arrived,” she says. “We’ve lost a significant portion of our livestocks’ feed. We have not been able to hunt, and without being able to bring in game, our supplies will reduce faster than we’ll be able to replenish them.”

“Shoulda fought them off when they first showed up,” someone shouts from the back. Ellie twists to see who it is, indignant, but Joel puts his hand on the back of her head and turns her forward again. Scattered agreement threads through the room, and Jacoby, standing just behind Maria, cuts in sharply:

“That route would have depleted our ammunition supply entirely.” He shakes his head, his long black ponytail swinging through the air like a scythe behind him. “Our best chance now is to wait for the deep freeze and pick them off then.”

“That’s months away,” someone argues, and Maria replies, firm and smooth:

“We are aware.” Her voice softens, just a smidge, a way it doesn’t often when she’s in public settings like this. “Please - trust us when we say that we have only the health and the safety of our town at heart. We will not survive this if we do not work together. We have never in the ten years we have been on this land faced a threat like this. Our best chance at outlasting this is to cooperate with each other.”

Someone snorts. Ellie thinks it’s gotta be one of the asshole Colewell brothers, but Joel’s still got his hand on the back of her head so she can’t scrounge around to see them. A couple other dubious voices join the fray, but most of the noises Ellie hears are sympathic, in agreement. She focuses her eyes on Maria as she continues to speak.

“We are asking that all private food stores be donated to the community kitchen and pantry.” Sharp cries of incredulity rise; Maria holds up her hands, waits it out. “We are asking,” she reminds the room flatly. “We are not demanding it. We - members of this council, on the advice of our clinic staff - have created a ration system that is tailored to fit the needs of our community. Going forward, all weekly food allotments for households will cease. Meals will be served three times a day in the dining room, as they always have been. A fourth meal will be served for those on the graveyard shifts at the stables and walls.”

Maria’s voice softens. “We are - aware of this looks. We are not trying to hoarde resources or create barriers to feeding your fanilies. Households with children under th age of five will receive daily at home allotments of dairy products and grains for their children. We would ask that you all work with us here on this. It’s not ideal, and frankly, it’s scary to find ourselves in this situation.” Maria’s eyes sweep the room. Her gaze glances off of Ellie’s skin with all the heat of a branding iron. “But we are stronger than our fear, and stronger than those monsters outside. We will get through this. Please - trust us, and trust your neighbors. That’s all we ask.”

*

At home, Ellie and Joel comb through their pantry, taking glass jars of strawberry preserves and wax paper bags of string beans, long knots of braided garlic out. Joel found a couple milk crates in the garage, and Ellie watches with sickening dread as they fill and their shelves empty. Joel’s quiet, his eyes unreadable; he’s not mad, Ellie thinks, but he’s not happy either.

“You don’t really look like you want to do this,” she observes, stuffing two stoppered glass bottles of silty vegetable broth into one of the crates. Joel huffs, his back to her.

“I don’t.”

Ellie fiddles with the cork stopper of one of the bottles. “Then why are we? Maria said we didn’t have to. They aren’t making us.”

Joel glances at her over his shoulder, eyebrow cocked. “And how do you think that would look? Rest’a the town turns in their food for the greater good and council member’s family don’t?”

Ellie’s face burns. “I didn’t - that wasn’t what I was trying to do,” she defends waspishly, and Joel sighs, turns to face her. He’s got jars of blackcurrent jam in his hands.

“I know it wasn’t,” he says softly. “But there’s a lot goin’ on behind the scenes of this, baby. A lot you might not see as clearly. We gotta- we gotta be above reproach, right now.”

Ellie looks down at her hands. The skin on the back of them is dry, chafed pink from the cold weather and the wind. She feels that hollow maw inside open just a hair further at Joel’s gentle admonition. He blames me, she thinks, then backtracks furiously. No, he doesn’t.

“Ellie?”

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

The words fall across them with all the grace of an avalanche. Joel’s silent; without daring to look at him, she screws up her courage and goes on, “The horde - they might not have come this way if I wasn’t out there.”

“Hey, now,” Joel starts, soft, but she overrides him.

“If I hadn’t left - hadn’t tried to- to get to Cody, all this wouldn’t be happening.”

“Ellie, that ain’t true.” He crosses the room to her, deposits the jars of jam on the scratched surface of their table before slipping a finger beneath her chin and forcing her head up. His dark eyes are intent, opaque, as he searches her face. “We’re the only settlement in this valley. Even if you hadn’t been there, they woulda found us. And we wouldn’t have had the warning we did. We - it coulda been real ugly, honey. We helped prevent that. Ain’t any of what’s goin’ on now your fault.”

She sniffles. She doesn’t quiet believe him, but she can tell he’s not going to take no for an answer. “Alright,” she whispers, and he hesitates a second before looping his hand around to cradle the back of her neck, draw her in to him for a second.

“You’re a good kid, Ellie,” he tells her sternly. “You make people’s lives better by bein’ in ‘em. None of this - this guilt trippin’ anymore, you hear me?”

She blinks, grateful for the press of his flannel on her face, for the second it allows her to hide herself away from him, to compose herself. She has to be strong now, she thinks. There’s not more room for error.

“I hear you,” she agrees, and Joel’s hand tightens briefly on the back of her neck.

“I reckon if anyone’s at fault, it’s me,” he says, and Ellie pushes herself off his chest with her palms, scowling. He frowns when he sees her expression. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s - I shouldn’t have said those things to you. You wouldn’t have left if I- if I hadn’t put that on you.”

“It’s okay,” Ellie starts, and Joel shakes his head, sharply.

“It’s not,” he counters. “It’s - it wasn’t right of me. You didn’t deserve to hear those things.”

Ellie sticks her thumb in her mouth, chews at the cuticle. “It’s not like it’s not true,” she hedges, and Joel’s face splits open like an overripe peach, swollen with shame, bursting with regret.

“Ellie,” he begins, slow and careful, and Ellie shrugs one shoulder. His hand, still clasped on it, moves up and down with the movement.

“Joel, it’s-”

“You are not a brat,” he cuts her off, sternly. “And you - what I said about you and Sarah, I- it wasn’t right of me. And I’m sorry. It’s not - that’s not what I think of you. You’re a good kid. You’re smart, and you’re tough, and you’re brave, and I - I don’t ever look at you and wish you could be someone you’re not. Alright? I’m sorry.”

Joel’s profile, framed in a halo of glittering afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows, goes grainy in front of her. She ducks her head, rubs at her eyes with the underside of her wrist. “Alright.”

Joel’s hand tightens on her shoulder. He holds her there another minute longer, her skin tingling with the warmth of his gaze, and then he lets her go, steps back.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get these down there.”

*

A sort of cloud settles over Jackson as November marches on. The weather turns colder by degrees, till one day Ellie wakes to find a layer of white powder covering their yard. She scrambles to her window, still half asleep, and heaves the sash up, her heart pulsing at the base of her throat. Surely the snow will have driven them away, she thinks wildly, or forced them to huddle down and hibernate-

A blast of icy wind sprays flakes of snow into Ellie’s room, soaks her pajamas. The cries of the Infected chase after it, and in the hallway Joel, stepping out of the bathroom, barks, “Girl, close your goddamned window.”

She does, disheartened, and is dismayed by the way the first snowfall of the season transforms Jackson further into a ghost town. The streets are empty of the normal vestiges of the winter season: children running around in pompommed hats with red noses and bright eyes; barrels of timber burning on the street corners, surrounded by clusters of chattering neighbors; pine boughs and hollyberries and twinkling fairy lights strung across the square. Now Jackson squats, dull and quiet, beneath the bowl of the pale winter sky, and the clamor of Infected at the gates washes out even the restless lowing of the cattle herd.

They take their meals daily in the cafeteria, which is more crowded than ever before. There’s an air of forced camaraderie that hangs over the room. People still chat and they smile, but their eyes are wary and tired. They’re careful to eat every morsel of food on their plate, and Ellie finds herself doing the same, even when they serve steamed carrots or red beans over fish, which she hates. Sometimes it feels like it did when she was in Boston: staring down at a bowl of slop or greasy stew and trying to shore up her reserve to power through it, because she knew it was going to be the only sustenance she was getting.

Joel’s particularly twitchy during meal time. They’ve always eaten most of their meals at home, either at their house or Tommy and Maria’s, because he doesn’t like crowds. “Reminds me of the QZ sometimes,” he’d said once, and so Ellie’s not surprised when a few days of thrice daily communal meals starts to wear on him. He doesn’t say anything, but she can tell by the way he flexes his hand against his thigh or sort of spaces out that he’s miserable.

It only takes about a week for the cracks in the surface of their new routine to begin to show. Terry Colewell skips the allotted dinner time slot, then tries to get dinner at the fourth meal for late night stable workers and wall patrol, and is denied. The next morning he stands on the corner in front of the dining hall and tells everyone that he was denied food, that the council is trying to hoard resources for themselves, that they’re going to clean out the town by starving their opponents, one by one. Ellie hears him throw around the words totalitarian and abuse of power, and Maria passes Rafa to Ellie, orders her:

“Go inside and wait for me.”

They’re on their way to the council house. Ellie hitches Rafa up onto her hip and protests, “Maria-”

“Go. Now.”

Ellie goes, stomping, but rather than go inside, she sits on the front steps of the council house and lets Rafa play in the snow drifting up against the base of the stairs. She can still hear the murmuring of the crowd: voices and footfalls echo around the corner of the street, and she thinks she hears Maria, but she’s not sure. She sits with her hands clamped between her knees to keep them from shaking and tries to pay attention to what Rafa’s saying to her, but everything is starting to feel fuzzy and patchy-

Maria comes around the corner, her face tight. Rafa sees her and runs to her, and Maria bends to heft him up. She smiles at her son, but the look she levels Ellie with is almost angry. It stops the panic in its tracks. “When I say go inside, I mean inside, Ellie.”

Ellie scowls. Maria mounts the steps beside her, crosses the wide porch to yank the front door open. Ellie snaps, “You can’t just - expect me to leave you to deal with that shit on your own.”

“I expect you to do as you're told,” Maria fires back. She’s tight lipped and wild eyed. Ellie can’t remember ever really seeing her like this before, vibrating with rage. She decides it's in her best interest to just shut up, so she does, and that night she goes to sleep on the pull out couch in Rafa’s room, and when she wakes up, Rafa’s climbed out of his crib and into her arms, and the house downstairs is full of people.

Well, full is sort of an exaggeration. Ellie creeps to the top of the stairs and lies flat on the floor with her chin propped up on her folded arms and listens. The lights are all off, but the fireplace is glowing, throwing shadows across the living room and hallway floor that dance like living things. In the kitchen, the flickering glow of a candle skitters along the threshold of the hallway. Cups clink and voices rumble. Ellie closes one eye to focus, manages to pick out the low drawls of Joel and Tommy, the sharper throaty whisper of Maria, the languid sloping of Jacoby and the Deep South twang of
Andrea. She hears Lyle too, and Fiona, and Rebekah. Most of the council’s here, Ellie realizes. It’s after midnight, long after curfew. She pushes herself further back into the shadows and listens.

“-readjust the ration plan,” Rebekah’s saying. “We were relying on that bulgar to flesh out the grain supply for the cattle and horses. We’re down by a huge margin. We’ve cut and dried all the grass from the northern field already. We have maybe another month of feedings for them if we can’t supplement.”

“Horde might be gone by then,” Lyle muses, and Maria replies:

“It doesn’t matter at this point when they leave. We can’t run through our on-hand supplies with the hope of finding more once the horde’s gone. We won’t have enough to see us through the entire winter if we do that.”

“People are already mad,” Andrea points out. “Terry Colewell’s got a lot of them riled up. I don’t want to ask them to reduce their food intake further and risk alienating more folks.”

“I don’t see what the other option is,” Maria says tiredly. “We can’t lose the herds. We can’t leave the walls- there’s rarely any good hunting in these parts after December anyways. We’d have to send groups out closer to Yellowstone for the elk and the bison, and we can’t do that without encroaching on Wind River.”

“Has anyone spoken to Chief Pohoini?” Tommy asks. “Jacoby?”

Jacoby clears his throat. A chair leg scrapes sharply along the tiled floor. “We spoke over the radio three weeks ago,” he says evenly. “They aren’t willing to negotiate aid unless the horde is gone. They - they do not want to draw attention to themselves.”

“We’re not asking them to,” Fiona cuts in, and Tommy cuts her off:

“That’s exactly what we’d be askin’ them to do. No. Chances are FEDRA was responsible for pushin’ the horde into the pass in the first place. I’d bet you anything they’re keepin’ an eye on the air waves. We can’t risk it, and we won’t risk the folks at Wind River. No.”

No one disagrees with him. Ellie listens to the sounds of slurping, to the hissing of the candle as it burns. Joel gets up and crosses the hallway into the living room, stirs the fire around a little. Ellie watches him warily from the top of the stairs, but he doesn’t even turn in her direction as he strides back to the kitchen. “What’re we lookin’ at?” He asks. “Time wise, if we cut down on the allotted grains to supplement the herds?”

“You mean at our current rate?” Fiona asks. Joel grunts. Paper flutters, tears. “A month.”

The silence that descends over the house is drenching. Ellie sort of wishes she wasn’t listening in right now. She hears Joel take in a long, shaky breath. “A month?”

“We haven’t been able to hunt in longer than that already,” Maria points out grimly. “Jackson’s food stores were only ever intended to last us two and a half without replenishment. And that was taking into consideration complete harvests.”

Ellie feels sick. She doesn’t need to hear more, she decides. She doesn’t need to lie here and think about what it’s going to feel like to watch her family and neighbors starve to death, slowly, shriveling up like the leaves of the oaks in the cold. She doesn’t need to lie here and remember: that she did this, that she brought this down on them.

I’m gonna save the fucking world, man, she’s told Joel once. Three years since that day and all she’s managed to do is condemn it, over and over and over again.

She goes back to bed and curls around Rafa, lying in a square of pearly moonlight, and cries herself to sleep.

*

Winter descends with a fury. Another town meeting is called. Maria and the council stand at the front and lay out the new ration plan, citing the need to keep the herds fed. When people muddle in contention, she reminds them:

“Slaughtering our animals is a short term solution. We cannot re-grow milk cows or goats from seedlings in the spring. We cannot allow our fear to override our common sense. We have a plan. The plan - the plan is sufficient to see us through this time. Your cooperation is paramount to the survival of our town, of our children.”

Her plea works for two days. Then someone steals two chickens, and the council divests patrollers from the wall to guard the stables and barns and coops, and people seethe with discomfort. At the next town meeting, Niall Lager says, “I get it. I do. But it don’t sit right with me, to be asked to stand guard against each other. We trained to keep this town safe from outside treats, not from each other. I think you’re asking us to cross a line here.”

He’s very solemn when he says it, and Ellie watches a lot of other people bob their heads in agreement, and the sticky fear in her chest clings to the inside of her ribs, presses it’s cold hand around her heart, and she feels, for the first time since she left the walls to strike out for Cody, more angry than afraid. She ducks away from Joel after the meeting and finds Carlos and a few of his friends lingering on the corner by the stables. He stiffens when he sees her approaching.

“What?”

Ellie gets right up in his face, as close as she can get without kissing him. “You tell your dad,” she starts, voice trembling, and Carlos' face transforms, his lips tightening and his eyes narrowing, “that he’s going to cause trouble if he keeps running his mouth like that.”

Niall Lager is one of the lead patrolmen. If he sets himself against the council, Ellie thinks desperately, it all unravels from there. Carlos is silent, so she presses on, voice shaking, nails biting into her palms, “We’ve got enough trouble as it is-”

“Who do you think you are?” Carlos interrupts. His lip curls back in disgust. “You think you have any right to tell me what kind of trouble we’re in? You fucking brought them here, you jackass.”

She knows. She knows, she knows, she knows -

She hits him.

It’s not a good decision on her part. It’s an even worse fight. She and Carlos tussle wildly in the street for a minute, mud squelching, shouting. He’s got blood smeared across his lips and chin; her mouth tastes like copper. Her heart beats a tattoo against the back of her skull. They tumble to the ground, and she feels the wet slosh of snow against her back, under the hem of her coat. She kicks and dislodges him; rolls to the side to get away from him, lurches to her knees-

A pair of legs plant themselves at the edge of the circle of onlookers. She knows those boots, those jeans; Tommy snatches her up off the ground as easily as he would Rafa, swings her around to the other side of him, sets her none too gently on the ground. She wavers, blinks. Tommy’s got a hand fisted in the collar of her jacket, like she’s a fucking puppy he needs to haul around. He gives her a little push. “Go.”

She tries to wriggle free, to protest. “He-”

The sea of onlookers parts before them. Tommy shoves her down the pathway opened to them. “I don’t wanna hear it. March.”

She cries, “You’re not letting me talk-”

“Girl, I saw every damn second of that.” He shakes her, once, a warning. “I don’t wanna hear it. March.”

She marches, furious, embarrassed, all the way to their house, where Tommy doesn’t even knock before smacking the door open and shouting, “Joel, sort out your fucking kid!” He leaves her standing there in the hallway with mud in her hair and her lip still stinging and is gone before Joel even makes it outta the kitchen.

If she thought Tommy was mad, Joel’s even madder. He cleans her face up stoically, his jaw working, and then sends her upstairs to shower. The hot water burns in the cuts on her face; in the mirror afterwards, she watches herself gingerly touch her fat lip, the scrape along her jaw. She thumbs the tears out of her eyes and goes downstairs to face the music.

He doesn’t say much. He points to the table and she sits, sulkily, and he says, his voice measured, stern, “There is enough bullshit goin’ on right now without you addin’ to it like this. You know better.”

She does. She knows. She-

“I didn’t mean to,” she says quietly, and Joel shakes his head. His cheek twitches.

“Not again,” he tells her. “You understand me?”

It’s almost worse than him yelling, this quiet disappointment. She swallows and nods, and he nods back, sends her to her room. She lies on her bed and watches the sun travel in an arc across the sky, the shape of it reflected across her ceiling. The wild thumping of her heart beats in tandem with the sharp bluster of the wind against the house.

*

Thanksgiving comes and goes without any of the pomp Ellie’s used to. There’s no turkeys roasting on spits over outdoor hearths, no heaps of mashed potatoes with butter and gravy, no crusty rolls or sweet pumpkin pie. Everyone is gray faced and tired. It snows, and the drifts bury the town in heaps of glittering white, but no one builds snowmen or sleds down hills. Outside the walls, the Infected lumber around like yeti, ice clinging to their limp hair and fungal plates. They scream and throw themselves on the walls, slamming heads and shoulders against the stockade. All day long the walls vibrate with the repeated bashing. Ellie feels sick whenever she walks by; that shiver of fear has taken root in her stomach day and night has blossomed and bloomed despite her constant hunger. Her head always hurts and her fingers are always stiff.

Joel, Tommy, and Maria are worse off. Ellie’s not immune to the way their clothes sag around them, to the way their belts grow tigher and tighter. Joel cuts a new notch in his with the tip of his knife, then another, then another. When Ellie hugs him, she can feel the sharp point of his breastbone beneath her cheek.

It reminds her of that winter on the road, after Silver Lake, when they were both so beaten down that they could barely hunt or walk or scavenge for weeks. They’d sat holed up in that old gas station and ate cold beans and frozen berries and once or twice, some squirrels, some little rabbits. The meat was always stringy and tough; Ellie remembers the way it’d felt going down, greasy and slick, the way it pooled like rancid oil in her stomach. Some nights she’d have to sit propped up all night against Joel’s shoulder and breathe with her mouth open to keep from puking. She never, not once since they’d come back to Jackson, thought that she’d ever feel like that here.

But it feels that way now: dreary and depressing, terrifying in that way that knowing you are trapped and running out of options does. Jackson remains the same physically - the same buildings line the roads, the same people walk the streets- but the bones of it have fractured, shifts. The bedrock beneath her feet feels spongy and suddenly like something she could sink into and drown under.

And then - sickness comes.

December
There’s been no meat for weeks now. In the stables, the horse’s manes grow thin with stress and lack of exercise, lack of hearty meals; the cows in the barns are all pointy hipped and anxious. Ellie passes her hands over their sides and her fingers slips, two and three ata time, into the valley between their ribs.

There’s a valley inside of herself, she thinks. A faraway and lonely place, a place where hunger growls, day and night. Every meal is watery broth with salted vegetables, or oatmeal without cream. The bread is brown and hard and tastes like sawdust. It’s an effort to eat, to chew. Her teeth hurt. She lays her head on the table at the cafeteria one night and tells Joel, “I don’t want it.”

He hesitates, just a second. His beard is wiry and course, nearly completely grey. He says, “You gotta eat, baby. Come on.”

“I can’t.” Her stomach is pitching and rolling. The smell of it all - bodies pressed too close together, over-brined vegetables, the always present cloying rot - sticks to the inside of her nostrils. “I can’t.”

“Ellie…”

She waits for him to say something like you’re not leaving this table till you do, like Tommy or Maria say to Rafa when he’s throwing a fit. But all he does is sigh, lay a hand over the back of her neck. “Alright,” he says at last. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They go home and Ellie goes to sleep and wakes sometime later with the room spinning around her, the acid tang of bile on her tongue. Her head hurts and her chin is sticky and the blanket around her is wet and stinking, and Joel is coming into her room with his hair sticking up all crazy, saying her name in that voice of his, and she leans over the side of the bed and vomits again, and then again.

She’s sick for four days. She burns with fever; the first two days she can’t keep anything down, and she ends up huddled on the couch with her teeth chattering and her throat pulsing with pain, all scratchy from puking, and Joel paces and worries and coddles and sits with his face in his hands. Tommy comes over. Joel tells him to get out, they’re isolating, and Tommy tells him Rafa’s sick too, half the town’s sick and they might as well pool resources. Joel wraps Ellie up in a quilt and carries her across the road in the driving wind and snow and deposits her in the middle of Tommy and Maria’s big bed next to Rafa, his eyes fever bright and his face and chest mottled red with heat rash.

Ellie hears the words scarlet fever and flu, then Maria says “It’s neither of those, calm down, Joel, for Christs’s sake.” Ellie gets the feeling that Joel is being unmanageable, but she’s too tired to do anything about it. For two days she drifts in that haze, floating on gently rocking waves of pain and dizziness and nausea. She takes a bath at some point, she thinks. She eats a little, she thinks. Someone else comes over, someone presses hands she doesn’t recognize to her face and neck, listens to her lungs. There’s drops of bitter tea and a pungent salve rubbed over her sternum. Her lungs crackle and roar. She aches. She burns.

And then - she wakes up. It’s dark and the moon outside is obscured by a layer of clouds so fine they hang like a misty veil across the inky sky. Ellie feels gross, sweaty and sore. Her teeth hurt. Her lips sting when she licks them. Rafa is asleep next to her, curled over with his face pressed into her arm. Sweat glitters in his hair like a net of diamonds. Joel’s asleep across the foot of the bed, feet on the ground, arm thrown over his eyes. Tommy and Maria curl together in the armchair in the corner. Ellie blinks and waits for it all to dissolve: the pearlescent strands of moonlight clinging to the planes of Maria’s face, the trembling sonata of Tommy’s long breaths. The warmth of Joel’s free hand, curled around her ankle.

She waits for it to disappear, waits to slip back under the fog she’s lain suspended in for days now, but nothing happens. She’s awake, and she’s not sick anymore, and outside, the Infected are still hammering on the walls.

*

Everyone is sick, Joel tells Ellie. Half the town is down with something awful, and the other half is worn about halfway to death. The clinic’s full, and they’ve run out of yarrow root tea and Tylenol. A milk cow died and there wasn’t anyone available to butcher, so she’s lying beneath a tarp in the alley behind the butcher shop, frozen solid.

“Won’t spoil,” Joel tells Ellie. “Once folks are up and runnin’ again, it’ll be put to use.”

But folks don’t get up and get running. Some do, but for most of them, the sickness lingers in their chest and their bones. Ellie spends a lot of days napping in front of the fire, too tired to do much more than wash her face and eat the food Joel brings home for her. They tried giving her some of Rafa’s daily milk, but it’s too rich and she ends up puking it all up. She spends a week more huddled inside, bored out of her mind, until Joel deems her healthy enough to go outside again.

She goes back to wall patrol and the stables. She can’t do much - her arms tremble when she lifts them to pat the horses, and she can’t stand in the cold on the wall for very long at all - but she does what she can, and slowly, the rest of the town rouses too.

There’s another town meeting. It feels like they have one every other day at this point, Ellie grumbles to Joel, and he rolls his eyes. “Tell me about it,” he says, and she giggles. The sound is brittle and unfamiliar; it hangs in the air between them like a shroud. Joel stares at her, eyes glittering. Then he puts an arm around her, hugs her close.

“I love you,” he says into her hair. She feels the words crash over her like daybreak and sunset and the first tepid rain of summer. She hugs him back.

“Roger dodger.”

In the meeting, Lyle tells them that there will be meat this week - they’re butchering the dead cow. People stir in anticipation . Someone cries. Then he tells them that they are running dangerously low on fuel. Most of the homes in town are warmed by fireplace and wood stove; some have electric heat, but the systems are old and unsafe, and the dam does not generate enough stable electricity to power them all. “We will need to look into alternative fuel sources,” he says, carefully. The excitement lingering in the air over the previous announcement sours, dies. “We’d encourage households to come together for the time being,” he goes on. “Pool resources. We- this isn’t ideal. I know it isn’t. I’m sorry to keep asking so much of you.”

Someone in the back says, “At what point are we going to start killing those fuckers?”

Ellie turns. Terry Colewell’s risen, his face a mask of cold fury. Lyle answers, his voice steady but reedy, “We are anticipating a hibernation period with the deep freeze. Our plan remains the same- we will be able to dispatch them more efficiently, safely, then than we can risk now. We - to attempt it now, while they are cognizant and able bodied means risking the lives of people we cannot spare. Our decision on this remains firm.”

“I’d like a re-vote,” Terry says, and the crowd shifts uneasily. Ellie feels Joel and Tommy stiffen on either side of her. Maria rises, smooth and swift, from her seat at the front of the room and mounts the steps.

“If that’s what the people want,” she says loudly, “Then we’ll cast votes.”

They do, right then and there. Hands raise high into the air and Maria walks down the center aisle, counting and then recounting. In the end, the vote remains the same: wait for the deep freeze. But when they leave the church, Maria is shaking so badly that she jitters Rafa around, and Joel ends up taking him so she and Tommy can sit down somewhere alone.

Ellie follows Joel home, the snow crunching beneath her boots. Everything around her feels too big and too bright and sharp. She sucks in a breath of air, feels it splinter along her lungs. “The vote was closer this time.”

Joel’s face is grim. “A lot closer.”

In the house, she sits down to shuck off her boots. Joel kneels in front of Rafa, unzips his little blue snowsuit, helps him out of his bright red Elmo snow boots. “Why can’t we just try it?” She asks, and Joel turns to her. “Just - they’re cold enough that they aren’t at full strength. We could - pick some off from the wall.”

“We don’t have enough ammo for the whole horde,” Joel replies patiently. Rafa puts his hands on his shoulders, lifts one foot at a time so Joel can tug the snow pants off. “And the noise’ll rile them up. Could attract more, if there’s more in the valley. We ain’t been out patrolling in weeks. Months, now. Who knows what’s out there.”

The premonition sends a chill down Ellie’s spine. She hasn’t thought much beyond the immediate problem - the horde- but now she’s thinking abut the after: the things that they’ve let creep into their valley while they’ve been cloistered up here. “Do you think there’s people out there?” She whispers, and Joel pinches his lips together, his jaw working.

“I don’t know,” he says at last. He stands, knees creaking, and shoos Rafa into the living room. He’s got the boy’s wet snowsuit in one hand and his scarf in the other. Little droplets of snow melt off the cuffs, dribble to the ground. “But I do know that I’ll be damned if I stand by and let some fucking kids ruin my chances of defending my family against whoever’s out there because they wanted to be big shots here.”

Ellie blinks. The Colewell brothers are both well into their thirties. “They’re not really kids, dude.”

He huffs. “You know what I mean.”

She fights back a grin and loses. “I guess everyone’s a kid at your age, huh?”

Joel shoots her a scathing look, but there’s no heat in it. “Don’t you have some chores to do?”

*

December drags on, each day slower and colder than the last, and still the horde stays. More and more of them are motionless, lying in clusters across the expanse of the field beyond the gates, but enough of them are still alive that no one feels safe trying to fight their way out yet.

Ellie and Joel move into Tommy and Maria’s house to conserve fuel. All across Jackson, people are doing the same. The earlier sickness lingers on, waning and waxing, and the clinic remains overfull. They set up cots in the old church and cordone off the stairs. Anyone who isn’t sick or on medical rotation isn’t allowed in or out. Dina tells her that they’re putting the really bad ones in there, the ones who are probably going to die, and sure enough, two weeks before Christmas, the first death notice goes up. Several more follow over the course of the next few days, and the streets begin to thrum with an ugly tension that prickles the back of Ellie’s neck.

One day she goes with Maria and Rafa to get Rafa’s allotment of milk and oats from the kitchen. It’s a cold morning: gray clouds hang heavy bellied and low over the roofs of the houses, and the streets are slushy and suck at the soles of Ellie’s boots as they walk. She’s more than a little annoyed when they reach the back door of the kitchen and find Leo Colewell leaning on the wall, chatting with someone through an open window. He stiffens when he sees Maria.

“Morning, Councillor.” He’s sneering, his pale skin waxy below his swatch of freckles. The ugly smile he wears itches that spot in the the back of Ellie’s brain where he lives, and she finds herself stepping closer to Maria without realizing it, her heart frogging up in her throat.

Maria, for her part, remains unbothered. “Good morning, Mr. Colewell.” She moves past him, head high, and knocks once on the kitchen door before opening it. The worker who comes to the door - Tricia, Ellie thinks her name is- offers Maria a tired smile, a glass jar of milk, a wax satchet of oats. Ellie hugs Rafa to her chest and watches the way Leo regards her aunt the entire time the transaction takes place. The animal loathing in his eyes fills her belly with acid.

“Awfully convenient, don’t you think?” He drawls when Tricia’s closed the door and Maria’s turned away from him and the building. Ellie scans Maria’s face for any sign of reaction, but she’s as cool and guarded as ever. She opens her russack, carefully deposits the foodstuffs inside of it, and Leo says to her back, “Must be nice, the extra food for your family while the rest of us starve to death on your call.”

Maria’s jaw tightens. She slings her russack over her shoulder, jerks her head towards the end of the alley. “Come on,” she says to Ellie, and Ellie takes a step back, ready to turn, but Leo is suddenly looming there, standing between them and the mouth of the alley, blocking their view of the street.

“You ain’t heard me talking to you?” He spits, and Maria draws herself up straight. Her fingers dig into the meat of Ellie’s arm.

“I heard you,” she says in a low voice. It trembles with an edge of something Ellie isn’t used to hearing from her: a razor thin threat of violence, sharp and searing and volatile. “You think this is convenient for me?” She asks. Her words land like a whip across Ellie’s skin. “What is convenient, Mister Colewell, about knowing that I may not be able to feed my child in a month’s time? That knowing that my options are to starve my children in my home or let them be devoured by those things outside our walls?” Her voice rises. Leo steps back, just a step, but it’s enough. Maria shoves Ellie forward, knocks him aside. She snaps at him as they pass, “You don’t have children. Don’t you dare accuse me of taking the easy way out when you know nothing about the type of fear that raising a child in these times instills in you. You know nothing.”

And then they’re on the street, legs churning up the muddy ground beneath them at a frightening pace. A stitch forms beneath Ellie’s ribs; the grip Maria has on her arm is iron clad. Rafa begins to squirm, then cry. “Maria-”

But Maria either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t want to. She doesn’t stop till their home, till their front door is locked behind them and the silence of their chilly house echoes around them. Then she slowly bends, unknots the laces of her boots with shaking hands. “Ellie,” she says, her voice cool, steady somehow. “You don’t go anywhere near those men. You hear me?”

She’s already promised Joel she won’t, a hundred times over. Her tongue feels like it’s stuck to the roof of her mouth. When she doesn’t answer, only swallows, painful and raspy, Maria’s eyes sharpen to hers. “Ellie.”

“I won’t,” she promises, and Maria steps to her, wraps her arms around Ellie and Rafa both, squeezes them hard. There are tears shimmering on the ends of her lashes.

“We’re going to be okay,” she tells them. “Okay? We are.”

They might not be, Ellie thinks. She swallows again, nods, her chin knocking against Maria’s shoulder blade. She lies, “I know.”

*

The hollow hunger turns into a pulsing, living thing. Ellie lies awake at night and counts her ribs with the tips of her fingers, presses the pads of her thumbs against the sharp tines of her hip bones. Her head hurts all the time, and when she moves too quickly, stars burst and shimmer on the edge of her vision. The cold seems to sap every remaining bit of strength she has; at night, she curls into the mattress on the floor in the living room in front of the fire and drifts into a sleep so shallow that each gust of wind, each creak of the house rouses her.

Joel wants her to stay home. He and Tommy spent a good hour the night that Leo Colewell confronts them in the alley arguing with Maria. They were about ready to storm out and beat him up, Ellie thinks. Tommy’d been strapping on his gun belt with furious, trembling hands when Maria’d finally convinced them to stay put. “He didn’t hurt us,” she tells them sternly. “He didn’t say anything that was - insulting. He- he’s mad. Storming off to kill him will not solve anything.”

“Ain’t gonna kill him,” Tommy growls. A muscle in his jaw feathers. His eyes are dagger like, dark as obsidian, ready to cut. “Just gonna have a word with him.”

Maria scoffs. “Just a word, my ass.” Her eyes are serious as she crosses the room, takes Tommy’ face between her palms. “Look at me, mi corazon. I’m fine. Rafa is fine. Ellie is fine. There’s no reason for this.”

Tommy’s throat works. “He scared you,” he whispers, huskily, and Maria presses her forehead against his, her long locs streaming down her back.

“We are fine,” she presses. “Look at me. Our world is violent enough as it is. I do not want you bringing that here, into our home. Please.”

He softens. Ellie watches him find Joel’s eyes across the room, watches Joel’s jaw tick tighter and tighter before it unwinds. “Alright,” Joel says. He scrubs his hands over his face, swears quietly, explosively. “God fuckin’- alright.”

They don’t go anywhere that night but after Tommy and Maria have gone to bed, taking Rafa with them, Joel kneels beside Ellie and strokes the hair back from her forehead and says, very stern, “If those motherfuckers come anywhere near you, I want to know about it. If they even- look at you, I want to know about it. You hear me? I don’t want them breathing near you without my knowing. We clear?”

His palm is cool against her forehead. Ellie leans into it, lets his touch chase away the hunger, the fear and the terror of the past days. “Crystal.”

*

But the fear has sunk it’s claws into her belly now and it won’t let go. She replays that moment from the alley over and over on a loop in her brain: Leo smiling, pale purple lips stretching, teeth emerging inch by inch, and she sees David. David in the woods with the still warm body of a deer between them. David on the other side of a fire. David with his hand extended to her through the bars of that cage. David crouched above her, the burning lodge a halo around him-

He’s here now. He’s in her home- behind the walls of her town, hemmed in by the monsters bearing down on them. He’s on each snow laden street corner; he’s in line at the canteen and he’s in the stables mucking stalls and some nights, when the fist of hunger beats against the underside of her rib cage with enough force to keep her awake into the little hours, he comes to her in Tommy’s living room and kneels down beside her and tells her with his voice all downy soft and hungry, “We could still be good together, Ellie.”

And meanwhile, Jackson continues to cave around her. Hollows carve themselves into the faces of the people she loves. She watches their eyes glaze over, watches the listless way they shuffle from place to place, heads bowed against the cold, shoulders hunched. Joel puts another notch in his belt. Rafa’s pajamas sag off of him, and Ellie pretends not to hear the way Maria weeps in her bedroom at night. The nights get colder and they’re running out of firewood; they break tables and chairs, strip wood shingles and take fence posts from empty homes. It never seems to make a difference; Ellie shivers everywhere she is, even sitting in front of the fire, and everything feels dark and small and hopeless and her fault.

One of the milk cows dies. They butcher her and for the first time since before the sickness they have fresh meat and bone broth. It’s so rich that Ellie can’t stomach it. Her belly twists in relation, and she ends up puking in the snow outside the dining hall. She isn’t the only one. Still, when she goes back inside, wiping tears from her eyes with freezing fingers, Joel pushes his bowl to her. “Eat.”

She protests, “Joel-”

“Ellie.” It’s Maria, her eyes somber, face pinched in pain. Her voice is breathy. She nods at the bowl. “Please, baby. Eat it.”

Ellie forces it down, furious when her stomach expands and fills rather than contracts. She’s crying by the time the bowl is clear, and when Joel puts an arm around her and whispers something wet and low in her ear she doesn’t hear him. The bones of his arms are sticks, breakable and bird-like, over her.

*

Decemeber soldiers on. No one talks about Christmas but it’s coming, so Ellie finds little moments to slip away, to craft gifts for her family. An old purple headscarf, shot through with strands of glittery gold that she found months ago on patrol is wrapped for Maria. A silver belt buckle, a little spotted with age, depicts a watering hole with deer dipping their head towards it’s glassy surface is for Tommy. A plastic bucket of Lego Duplo blocks she soaks in cold water and scrubs till they shine for Rafa. For Joel, she trades two pairs of her jeans with Mrs. Casey for a pair of sturdy deer hide gloves. It’s Christmas Eve Day and they’re in her bag when Terry Colewell corners her in the stable.

She’s not even supposed to be there- she was with Maria at the council house, told her she had to use the restroom, and left to get the gloves. She figures Maria’s probably going to kill her or something when she gets back,but she’s had so little time to herself and she’s passing by the stables anyways and it’s been a minute since she’s been able to wander the aisles and brush her fingers over the velvety noses of the horses, breath in their scent, feel the quiver of their muscles beneath her palm.

She detours. There’s no one else there, no one to tattle on her, so she takes her time. At Curry’s stall she lingers, her heart pulsing against the base of her throat. It’s empty. The name plate on the door is dusty; she brushes it clean with her finges, lets herself root there for a second, lets the crashing wave of grief roll over her like the tide-

“You ain’t on the schedule today.”

Ellie startles, turns. Terry Colewell is a few paces away, slouching against the wall. His eyes are cold coins, flashing dully in the low light of the winter sun. Shadows writhe like snakes across his body. Ellie feels the fist in her stomach tighten, twist, turn-

“Your daddy around?”

Ellie can’t speak. The words jam up, cold and cramped, somewhere in the middle of her throat. Terry looks around, almost expectantly, then pushes off the wall. He takes a step towards her. “Listen, Ellie- it’s Ellie right? That your name?”

She can’t say yes. She can’t say no. She stares, her hand still on the nameplate of her horse’s stall, and the longer she doesn’t speak the wider the leer crawling across Terry’s face stretches. He comes towards her, another step that seems to cover miles, leagues. Suddenly he’s right there- he’s too close. She can feel the wash of his breath over her. His shadow eclipses her’s. “Ellie, you seem like a smart girl. So I wanna level with you a little, hmmm?”

His arm moves. Ellie flinches back, but it just settles over the top of Curry’s stall door, inches from her head, anchors him in place. He looms over her, blocking the path of the aisle to the doors, interrupting the beam of sunlight she’d been standing in. His eyes kindle with some kind of amusement when she backs up a step. “Christ, girl, I don’t want to hurt you. Just want to have a chat. Alright? Can I do that? That alright with you?”

It isn’t- but she feels herself nod anyways. She’s frozen in this moment, aware of how close his body is to her’s, aware of how small she is next to him, aware of -

“I just need you to carry a message along for me.” His voice drops, conspiratorial. His head dips in closer to her’s. She can see small strands of fine hair on the points of his cheekbones, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “You see, we got a lot of people in this town that don’t feel like it sits right, what we’re bein’ asked to do. And we ain’t bein’ heard. And we- well, there’s ways we could make ourselves heard, we reckon. But it ain’t something we want to come easy to. So you need to do us a favor. Alright?”

He pauses, waiting. Ellie tries to breathe and the air gets trapped somewhere between her lungs and her teeth. Terry’s hand, plastered atop the stall door, twitches towards her. “You need to go ahead and tell your daddy and your auntie-”

“Ellie.”

Ellie gasps. Footsteps echo down the aisle, and Terry retreats, takes a step back. Niall Lager rounds the corner, feed bucket in hand. His eyes cut across the two of them, taking in the sitatuon in one fell swoop. His jaw tightens. “What’s going on here?”

Niall spoke up against them in the meeting, Ellie thinks. He’s not on their side.But another voice - a louder voice, a voice that’s been silent so far today - chimes in: Niall is Joel’s friend. He’s Tommy’s friend. Niall’s an adult she can trust, she thinks dizzily. She shakes her head, steps away from Terry, closer to Niall.

“Nothin’ goin’ on,” Terry tells him smoothly. His arm comes down. Curry’s stall door creaks. “Me and Ellie here were just chatting.”

Niall eyes him for a second. There’s a light in his eyes that Ellie feels herself drawn to. She’s another step closer to him when he turns his attention back to her. “You’re not on the schedule today.”

She shakes her head. “No. I-”

“It’s almost dinner time,” he goes on, overriding her smoothly. “You’d best be heading out.” When she doesn’t move, her heart thumping wildly in her chest, he jerks his head in the direction of the stable doors. “Go on.”

She goes, giving Terry a wide berth, fighting to maintain an even pace, a mask of maturity and stoicism, but as soon as she steps foot into the sunlight, as soon as the full force of the winter wind lashes across her cheeks, she runs.

She goes back to the council house, locks herself in the bathroom, and heaves over the toilet, shaking. Snot and tears muddle with bile on her chin. She wipes at her face frantically, heaves again, and again till her chest cracks open with pain and her head swims, till the pulsing burn of hunger - of hollow anger, that enormous maw of emptiness - consumes her, leaves her shaking and weak. She slumps down the wall, sits with her head cradled on her knees, and fights through wave after wave of panic.

She’s gotta tell Joel, she thinks. She forces herself to her feet, sags against the wall, the door frame. I don’t want them breathing near you without my knowing.

She’ll tell Joel. She opens the door, closes it again. Presses her forehead against it. Thinks about Joel and Tommy, strapping on their gun belts, faces hard, ready to enact violence on her behalf. Ready to assure her that men like Terry Colewell - men like David, who prey on the fear of young girls, who find savor in the terror of hungry children - cannot exist when men like them are around. And usually - it's a comfort. It’s knowing that she’s safe; that the things that happened to her before when she was alone won’t happen again.

But right now - it’s all too much. Everything is a mess and it’s all her fault and she- well, he didn’t do anything to her, not really. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t threaten her. He scared her a little, yeah, but that’s sort of more on her than it is on him, right?

Right?

She opens the door, goes back upstairs. Maria’s in her office, winding her scarf around her throat. She looks ready to spit daggers when Ellie comes in.

“Where the hell did you go?” She demands. Ellie opens her mouth and no words come out, and Maria deflates, a ship with no wind in it’s sails. “Ellie, what’s wrong? Where were you?”

She doesn’t reply. She shakes her head, grinds her molars together. Despite her best effort, tears leak out of the corners of her eyes, trickle down her cheeks. Maria crosses the room to her and thumbs them away, holds her face in her hands. Her eyes are dark with worry. “What’s going on, sweetie?”

“I’m - hungry,” Ellie croaks. And it’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth.

But it doesn’t matter, because Maria buys it. She tucks Ellie’s head into the crook of her neck, hooks her chin over her head, squeezes her. “I know, baby,” she says. “I know.”

They go to dinner and Maria doesn’t tell Joel about Ellie’s disappearing act. Ellie eats the soup she’s given - the last of the milk cow, small chunks of soft potato - and somehow manages to keep it down. She doesn’t see Terry or Niall or Leo or even Tommy at dinner, and afterwards they go home. Ellie goes up to Rafa’s bedroom and sets to work wrapping the presents for her family with the door half shut to keep out prying eyes. She’s nearly done when the front door bangs open and Tommy comes in. She hears Joel greet him, hears Rafa’s squeal of Daddy! and Tommy says, his voice crisp and hard:

“Where’s Ellie?”

Her stomach drops. Joel says, “She’s upstairs-” And Tommy hollers up the staircase:

“Ellie!”

Ellie goes down with her heart in her throat. Tommy’s standing at the bottom of the steps, his face a mask of cold fury. It’s not directed at her, she knows, but the sight of it stops her in her tracks. Joel’s in the kitchen doorway, Rafa dangling from his arms, looking confused. Tommy asks Ellie, a dangerous edge to his voice, “There something you want to tell us?”

There isn’t. She shakes her head. Tommy’s nostrils flare. Joel sets Rafa on his feet, pushes him a little in the direction of the living room. Maria appears over his shoulder, her face creased in concern. “Ellie,” Joel says, soft and stern. “What’s going on, baby?”

She starts to cry. She doesn’t mean to; it all just comes spilling out of her, all of this ugly fear and the guilt and the ever present, all consuming hunger. She’s crying so hard that she can’t speak; Tommy meets her on the steps where she’s at, tucks her into his chest, and guides her downstairs. He talks over her head in a low urgent voice: he saw Niall on his walk home, just now. Niall said he’d come into the stables for his shift this afternoon and saw Terry Colewell accosting Ellie. Didn’t touch her, he said, as far as he could see, but he didn’t know what he said to her and she was scared and Terry wasn’t letting her go and Niall wanted to make sure she was alright, that if that motherfucker did anything to her to let him know and he’d-

Joel pries Ellie from Tommy, holds her upright by her upper arms. His face in the flickering light of the fire is terrible. “Ellie, baby,” he pleads. “What happened? Did he - what did he do?”

He didn’t do anything, she thinks. She tells him this. The words explode like sticks of dynamite as they leave her chest. Nothing, she says, he just scared her, he was a little too close but he didn’t touch her, he just wanted to talk, he didn’t touch her but she thinks he might have tried to if - if Niall didn’t come, he didn’t - threaten her, she thinks, except for the way he was standing and looking and the way he made her feel, slimy and small and stunted and - and - and -

Joel crushes her to him, rocks her. He says over her head to Maria: “Still think he’s not a fuckin’ threat?”

Maria’s hand lights on the back of Ellie’s head. “Take your guns,” she says.

*

They go. They’ll get Niall, they say. Miguel too. “Find Lyle and Jacoby,” Maria tells them. They leave and Maria bundles Ellie in close to the fire with Rafa and lies on her side behind them on Ellie’s mattress, the two of them laced against her. She tells them the Christmas story and she strokes back Ellie’s hair and she waits till Rafa’s asleep to prop herself up on her elbow and take Ellie’s chin in her fingers and say:

“None of this is your fault.”

“The horde-”

“None of it. Not the horde - the state of the town- Curry- and definitely not what that man did to you. Do you hear me?”

“He didn’t-”

“He did. He scared you. He found you in a vulnerable place and he took advantage of that. He did what he wanted to, which was frighten you. Frighten me, and Tommy, and your dad. He’s getting what he deserves, and it’s not your fault. Are you listening? We do not excuse the behavior of shitty men in this house, Ellie, especially when that behavior is aimed at us. Am I clear?”

Ellie nods weakly. Maria leans over Rafa, bridges the distance between them, and kisses the side of her head. “You’re a good girl,” she says. “None of this is on you. And I’m sorry you have to experience it at all. You deserve better than this.”

It’s the first time in a long time someone’s told her that. She closes her eyes, feels the sob climbing its way up her throat. “Okay,” she agrees, and she falls asleep there, exhausted, everything hurting, everything weeping inside of her, with Maria’s arm around her and Rafa squished between them, and when she wakes, hours later, Joel’s stretching himself out beside her. Maria and Rafa are gone. She turns blearily towards him and he hushes her, reaches over her to stir the fire back to some smoldering form of life.

“It’s alright,” he whispers. “It’s just me, baby. Go back to sleep.”

The fire kindles behind her back, and his arm drapes over her, pulls her in. She puts her face in his shoulder and breathes in the scent of him: woodsmoke and whiskey, gun powder and cold earth and something that’s tinged a little coppery, something laced with the aftertaste of violence. She finds the thing in her that calls to that and she pushes herself to meet it with open arms.

She falls back asleep and wakes on Christmas morning with her head throbbing and her mouth as dry and sticky as cotton. She’s freezing; the fire’s died down and even tucked into Joel like a koala bear she can feel shivers raking her body. She rolls softly away, blinking against the light coming in through the living room windows: bright and cold and kaleidoscopic as it shatters against the floor-

She stumbles to the window, looks out. The world is encased in ice, one long glass sheet that starts at her home and extends out, pulling the branches of trees to the ground and wrapping the fence posts and the street signs in silvery sheen. She stuffs her feet into Joel’s boots, her heart hammering, and tugs his coat over her arms. There’s spots of blood on the cuffs, still damp. She ignores them and yanks the front door open- it creaks and crackles and a sheet of ice falls away and shatters inwards across the hallway floor when it finally swings free. In the living room, Joel shuffles, groans.

“Ellie?”

She steps outside onto the porch. The cold steals the breath from her lungs, sears her exposed skin with a thousand small burning irons. Ice splinters beneath her, and all around her, the earth lies cold and utterly - completely -silent.