Everything happens for a reason…
Ellie's eyes shot open, Joel's labored breathing comforting for a few seconds. They made it through to another day, even if her jaw was killing her and she felt stiff as a board.
"-find her!"
Ellie shot upright. Shit. Shit. She got to her feet and climbed on top of the washing machine under one of the small, shattered windows and peered out from behind the ragged shirts she'd hung over it.
Three men walked down the middle of the street, obviously searching for something. Searching for her. Ellie let the shirt fall back into place.
"Oh, fuck," she muttered, a flutter of panic growing inside her. "They tracked me."
She hopped down from the washer and knelt next to Joel. "I'm gonna draw them away from here. I'll come back for you."
Ellie scooped up her backpack-rifle, bow, and all-and slung it over her shoulders, taking the stairs two at a time. She ran through the house and into the garage, startling a drowsing Callus. He snorted and laid his ears back at her.
"Sorry." She grabbed his bridle and sidled up next to him, throwing the reins over his head. Ellie placed her shoulder under his jaw and crossed her arm over the bridge of his nose to hold him steady and keep the bridle in place. With her other hand she jammed her thumb into the corner of his mouth and pressed down hard on his gums until he reluctantly accepted the bit. She slid the straps of the bridle into place, then turned to open the garage door. Callus walked out on his own and stopped a few paces away, head lifted and turned toward the street, his ears pricked.
Ellie followed him, pulling the garage door shut behind her. She caught it before it hit the ground, then slowly crouched to keep it from making noise. "Easy…"
She slid her fingers out from under it and jogged over to Callus, pre-fight nerves twisting her stomach into knots as she mounted him.
"Go," she whispered, hunching her shoulders and giving him a gentle nudge. Callus started forward, tense and jittery under her. They rounded the side of the house and two men came into view. Where was the third?
"Are we even sure she's here?"
"Man, there were horse tracks down the middle of the fucking street. She's here."
Ellie hadn't even considered the possibility David would send someone after her. Rough hands fisted in her jacket and tried to pull her down from Callus' back.
"Hey, I got her!"
So that's where the third guy got to. She struggled against him, but he'd grabbed one of her hands and was tipping her out of the saddle. What the fuck, Callus? A little intervention wouldn't go amiss!
"Get your ass over-" He cut off with a gurgle and Ellie yanked her switchblade from her throat.
"What are you waiting for?! Shoot her!"
"But David said-"
"Fuck David, shoot her now!"
"Go!" She kicked Callus' sides and he eagerly complied as a bullet whistled over their heads. He thundered down the street, Ellie tucked low against his neck and just barely holding on, much less steering him. He leaped over a log lined with barbed wire and a man lunged at them, grabbing onto Ellie and the saddle. She clawed at his face, jabbing her fingers into his eyes and pushing against his head to get him to loosen his grip. He let go of the saddle to grab her arm, giving her just enough room to smash her knee into his chin. He slid away with a startled yell, tumbling into the snow.
The scenery passed by in a blur, Callus needing no more incentive to gallop than the bullets flying their way. Pain erupted in Ellie's left shoulder, her vision whiting out for a second. She thought she might have screamed, but the most pressing thing on her mind after her vision cleared was righting herself. She was fairly certain her head most definitely not supposed to be that close to the ground. Ellie pulled herself back up mostly with her right arm, her left throbbing with pain. She abandoned the reins and buried her fingers in Callus' mane, gulping air and trying not to cry.
"Come and get me, you fuckers!" She didn't care that her voice cracked. Oh god it hurt. Icy wind passed over the wound like a knife and the blood steadily soaking her sleeve was freezing to her skin.
"She's getting away!"
She was? Ellie looked up and squinted through the wind and tears. The woods. Yes, she could lose them in the woods.
"Shoot the horse! Shoot the fucking horse!"
A shot rang out and Callus stumbled, screaming. He tipped to the side and Ellie barely managed to jump free before his shoulder crashed into the frozen ground. They tumbled down the hill, Callus' whinny cut off mid-note with a sickening crunch when they hit the bottom.
"Oh man," Ellie whispered, shaking as she rolled to her feet and took in the bloodied wreck of her horse. Dull eyes and white bone gleamed mockingly at her, a red pool spreading beneath him on the snow. "No…"
She turned and made herself start down the hill, toward the cabin, grasping at her shoulder. "I need to go around...Get back to Joel…"
"Where is she?"
"She's running for the cabins!"
Ellie broke into a run and dove through a window into the nearest cabin, shots kicking up snow and dirt at her heels. She crossed the small bedroom and shoved open the door, falling to her knees in a hallway. She crawled forward, into the kitchen, and took shelter behind the counter.
"Are we really killing her? David said he wants her alive." Ellie turned her head to inspect her arm. Blood sluggishly ran from a furrow on the top of her shoulder just deep enough to hurt, but not enough to hinder. The bullet had only grazed her.
"He doesn't get to make that call. James told me it's the girl from the University. How many of our guys were killed there?" She pawed through her backpack, looking for the medkit she picked up the day before. Wait. She patted her pockets. Ah. There it is. Ellie pulled it out and popped open the lid, hoping it had some form of disinfectant…
"Oh shit. I didn't know that was her." The voices grew closer. Aha! Hello, travel-sized antiseptic spray. She popped the cap off the spray, quickly spritzed her shoulder, then started packing gauze into the furrow. "Screw David, then. I ain't takin' a chance with this."
"I just want to finish up and go home. I'm freezing my ass off."
You and me both, buddy, Ellie thought, unraveling the ace bandage. She wrapped it tightly over the gauze and patted it down to make sure it stuck.
"I'll go this way. Check out that cabin."
She rolled to her feet and readied her bow, biting her lip and doing her best to ignore the protests of her shoulder. A man with a scarf pulled up over his mouth walked into the family room adjacent to the kitchen, a rifle in his hands. Ellie let her arrow fly, taking him in the chest.
"Oh shit!" The second guy ran over to his buddy and knelt beside him. She put an arrow in the back of his neck and waited, listening, and started to count. She reached fifteen without any other hunters making themselves known and crept over to the two bodies to retrieve her arrows. One of them had broken, but Ellie salvaged the ammo from one guy's rifle and picked up the other's shotgun. Cool. She retreated back into the cabin and braced the shotgun against her shoulder, looking down its bent sights. She scowled at the obvious disregard for the weapon's care, but put it muzzle-first into her backpack anyway. If she had to use it, she doubted the sights would matter.
Movement outside caught her attention. Ellie waited, but nothing happened. No shouts, no other noises...She crept back out to the bodies and saw a hunter moving around in the cabin across the lane and another coming down the street, toward her hiding place. Ellie notched an arrow and dropped the one on the street. The man in the house exited through its back door and crossed the lane to the wooden gazebo to her right. She nailed him in the liver.
She waited half a minute, then slowly stood up. No one shot at her. Ellie let her arm fall to her side with a relieved sigh and adjusted her bandage. Strange. It didn't hurt as much as it did before. It still throbbed and ached something fierce, but at least it didn't feel like she was trying to cut through her shoulder with a rusty spoon anymore. She pulled out the little bottle of antiseptic and read the label. Bactine, the pain-relieving cleansing spray. Huh. Neato.
Tucking the bottle away, she jogged over to the bodies. The guy in the gazebo had jack shit and broke her arrows when he fell. The guy on the street also broke her arrow, but made up for it in ammo for her shiny new gun and a molotov.
A bullet bit the ground an inch from her foot. Ellie dove to the left, behind a low stone wall serving as the railing for a set of stairs leading down to the frozen lake, and switched out her bow for her rifle. She risked a peek over the wall but was forced to duck almost instantly. Two guys, one on the steps at the far end of the area, the other loitering near the restrooms, past the second cabin down, taking pot-shots at her. Ellie broke cover and ran into the second cabin, a shot kicking up her ponytail as it whizzed past her head. She ran straight through and out the back, catching the shooter by surprise. Her shot took him in the chest. The second guy made a break for the snack bar on the shore and Ellie took out one of his knees.
"Hey!" She turned at the shout just in time to get her rifle knocked aside and pulled into a choke hold, actually lifted off the ground. She gasped and dug her fingernails into her assailant's hand, getting him to loosen his grip just enough for her to get her chin down and bite his arm. He yelled and shoved her away, reaching for his pistol. Ellie drew hers faster and put a nice little hole between his eyes.
The first guy was gone, a trail of blood and disturbed snow showing that a buddy of his dragged him into the snack bar. She snatched up her rifle and put a hole in the man running down the stairs. Two left. Carefully, she advanced closer to the shop, using the crumbled walls of the walkway as cover. Ellie got close enough to see the man she injured through the window, and then fire exploded to her right, licking at her jacket. She vaulted over the low wall and hit the ground running, sliding behind a plastic blue shipping container. She stuck her arm into the snow to put out the flames dancing on her sleeve and shotgun pellets punched through her cover, peppering the ground next to her.
Ellie darted around the snack bar, slinging her rifle over her shoulder and pulling out her own shotgun. Time to see what it could do. She jumped through the window and fired, the sound like a cannon going off in such close quarters. The shot pulped the man's chest, shattered bone and fleshy chunks raining down in a torrent of blood as he fell.
Whoa nelly.
Ellie turned at the sound of the injured man crawling forward in an attempt to get his buddy's gun. She kicked it out of his reach and the shotgun bucked in her hands again, cracking his head like an egg. She held still, listening, but the only sound was her own ragged breathing and the howl of the wind outside.
She crouched and divested the corpses of their ammo-three shells for her shotgun, including what was in the other guy's weapon, and three rifle rounds. On her way out of the snack bar, she found a bar of chocolate just sitting out on the counter. It was frozen solid and eighteen years past its expiration date, but Ellie tucked it into the inside pocket of her jacket anyway. Chocolate was good for a lot longer than it said on the package, she found.
She went back to the cabin she started in and searched it thoroughly, taking only what she needed and could carry. She completed her methodical ransacking of every building in sight and sat down on the snowy steps next to a hunter's corpse to take inventory.
Chocolate bar, two cans of peaches, one can of noodles, matchbook-four matches left, three pairs of scissors, and half a container of sugar.
Ellie shuffled her foot away from the hunter's still-growing pool of blood. She frowned at him. He stared back, eyes glazed with death. She felt vaguely ill and looked away.
"Don't give me that look," she grumbled, glaring down at her shoes. "You fuckers killed Callus. You had it coming."
She folded her list and put it back in her bag, then stood up and continued up the stairs. Ellie paused at a sign, wiping away snow and grime to reveal the badly faded letters. "Nature track. Okay. That should get me out of here."
She turned and took two steps in the direction the sign was pointing, then stopped.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
The bridge was missing a section of its floor. The only place left for her to walk was a narrow, iced-over support beam. Ellie hesitantly crept out onto the beam, putting a hand against the cliff face for balance. The ice crunched under her shoes and she glanced down, just to see how far she'd fall if she slipped. Vertigo slammed into her and she stopped, almost losing her balance. Not only was the bridge a hazard in of itself, it was also over the freezing water of the lake.
"Come on, Ellie. You've got this." It didn't make her feel any better, but she finished crossing.
"Oh shit…" she mumbled, stumbling out onto the solid section of the bridge and leaning heavily on the railing. She took a few deep breaths and straightened. "Okay. Okay, I'm good."
Ellie continued along the trail, relieved to have solid ground under her feet. She had to crawl into to the next part of the path through a runoff pipe, tearing a new hole in the knee of her jeans in the process. She stood up and wiped her rust-coated hands on her jacket, walking forward. A fence blocked the path and another pipe waited. Resigning herself to more crawling, she ducked into the pipe.
"Agh…" Gross. Ellie paused to flick...whatever the hell that slimy substance was off of her hand and tried not to think too hard about what it might have been. She turned the corner in the pipe and sighed. "This damn thing is blocking me…"
She managed to turn around in the small confines of the pipe and head back out to the path, careful to avoid the patch of gooey something on the wall. She circled around to the blockage and grabbed hold of the wooden trash bin. "Here we go."
Ellie pulled back as hard as she could, only managing to shift one side of it, and let go when it made a thunking noise and settled a little deeper into its depression. Her shoulder wailed in agony, and when she touched the wound her fingers came away red. "Fuck…"
Ellie unraveled the bandage, gingerly picked out the gauze, and sacrificed the cleanest rag she had, laying it over the wound and pressing down. She re-wrapped the ace bandage over the rag as tightly as she dared. It was far from comfortable, with every movement sending a jolt of fire shooting through her shoulder, but at least she wasn't going to bleed out. She went back to the pipe and managed to squeeze past the bin, exiting to a ridge overlooking a lodge.
"That's the way back," she muttered, spotting a road leading back the way she came. "Hang in there, Joel."
Ellie jumped down from the ridge and crouched behind a low stone wall. Hunters. Fucking Christ. David really wanted to find her. She didn't want to dwell on why.
"Cover the grounds! Make sure she's not hiding somewhere over here!"
She readied her bow. The layout of the place was similar to the area with the cabins; an upper level housing the lodge and a lower level of dock space. Two men that she could see were on the upper level, with a third combing the lower. Ellie took out the man on the lower level first, then fired at and missed one of the men on the upper level climbing up the stairs to the lodge's porch.
"...The hell?" He turned and stared at the arrow sticking out of the banister next to his elbow. She tried again and took him in the throat. All she had to do was wait about a minute before the last guy ran over to his buddy's corpse.
You'd think, with the infection and all, it'd be habit to keep away from suspicious dead bodies, Ellie reflected, her arrow punching into the man's side with a dull thunk. True to form, a fourth man she hadn't noticed before came running over and subsequently died, his guts going for a ride on the arrow's fletching. Movement on the lower level caught her eye. A man was starting a sweep of the far side of the area-too far for her bow. She switched to her rifle, missed the first shot, but got him with the second. No one came running at the sound of gunfire, so Ellie assumed the area was clear and set about looting the bodies.
Excepting pistol ammo and three of her arrows, they had jack shit with them. They probably expected to be back at camp before supper. She started to wonder if they had anyone waiting for them, then violently shoved the thought away. No. Not opening that can of worms. Not now.
Ellie circled around the lodge, hoping for a straight shot to the road. Naturally, there was a big ass iron-wrought fence in the way. She sighed and eyed the dumpsters. Maybe if...She ghosted her fingers over the bandage on her shoulder. No. Even if the shooting hadn't fucked it up even more, the dumpster wouldn't give her enough height to get over the fence. The only way out was through. Reluctantly, Ellie turned to the lodge.
She had two options. Option one: lug a dumpster over to the side of the building and try to jump through the hole in the room without dying and/or making her shoulder worse. She wasn't a fan of option one. Option two: hop through the basement window and avoid unnecessary pain.
No contest. Ellie slipped behind the dumpsters and through the window, dropping down into the little room that was more of a tiny storage closet than a basement.
"I don't want to get trapped in here," she mumbled, starting up the stairs. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose. There was a definite sense that something in the lodge was wrong. Whatever it was, she couldn't put her finger on it, but crossed into the next room through the window instead of using the door and hid behind the reception desk.
Ellie stared at the hallways adjacent to the next room, half-expecting hunters or infected to pop out of the woodwork. Her palms itched and nothing happened. She edged out into the next room.
"She's on this side of the lodge!" Fuck. A bullet whistled over her head and she scrambled back to the reception desk, taking out her rifle. Two more shots splintered the doorjamb, but then things fell quiet again. They were behind her, at the front of the lodge. They would come in the way she did. Ellie took a deep breath and ran for the hallways, zig-zagging across the room just in case.
She got to the far end of the hallway and a hunter swung into sight to meet her. She tripped over her own feet in surprise and landed hard on her bad shoulder, tearing a half-scream from her throat. The hunter looked just as surprised to see her as she was to see him, losing a few precious seconds while he fumbled for his gun. Ellie turned on her back and shot first, not even trying to aim past pointing her rifle in his general direction. She couldn't miss at that range and he went down. She scrambled to her feet, breathing hard, with tears blurring her vision. She stumbled past his body and slumped down behind a desk in the next room.
"Hey, kid!" Ellie's hands tightened on her rifle. "Stop with this shit and put your weapons down! You're outnumbered and outgunned! You've got one shot, here!"
This fucker seriously thought he could bluff her into surrendering. Like hell. She scrubbed at her eyes and rolled into a crouch, resting the barrel of her rifle over the edge of the desk. The question now was, where is he hiding? The silence stretched on for a moment.
"Alright!" he yelled. Aha. Ellie swung her rifle to the right. Lounge area. Probably in that corner, behind the armchair. "Don't say we didn't give you a chance!"
She fired, her round punching through the flimsy chair with a puff of stuffing. The hunter gurgled and fell out from behind the chair, his eyes rolling back into his head. Ellie stood up and leaned against the desk, shaking like a leaf while she waited for the sickening pain in her shoulder to subside. It didn't.
With a resigned sigh, Ellie moved to the door on shaky legs. Naturally, the door was blocked. She glared at the obstruction through the glass. If there was ever a better time to be able to destroy things with her mind…
The box continued its boring existence, innocently blocking the way. She sighed again and set her rifle down. She braced her good shoulder against the door and pushed hard against it. As soon as the box fell over and the doors swung open, however, arms like a steel vice wrapped around her and dragged her back into the lodge.
One of her attacker's arms slid over her throat and clamped down, cutting off her airflow. Ellie pulled out her switchblade and drove it above her head, only for a hand to grab her wrist and force her arm down.
"Relax!" David. She struggled harder. "Keeping you alive, here!"
The black encroaching on the edges of her vision begged to differ. A few more seconds and the black covered everything, her thoughts scattering like scared rabbits.
"There you go…"
She woke to the sensation of movement and bound hands. Ellie struggled and caught David by surprise, kneeing him hard in the stomach. He dropped her into the snow with a curse. Tears sprung to her eyes as the pain in her shoulder momentarily increased, leaving her immobile and gasping.
Get up, get up!
She heard David sigh and approach her.
"You're quite the little hellion," he said with a weary chuckle, crouching beside her. "You shouldn't fight so hard. You're just hurting yourself."
"And you...shouldn't use a choke hold...to knock someone out," Ellie replied, trying to sink a bit of steel into her voice. Unfortunately, lying face-down in a snow bank, crippled with pain, wasn't exactly menacing.
"Oh?" David inquired casually.
"Mm. Only lasts a few seconds. Any longer and-" She tried to move and gasped, blinking rapidly to hold back tears. "-you wind up with a vegetable."
He laughed, a low, malicious sound that sent chills up her spine. "Good thing I brought a little backup. Breathe deep, now."
He pressed a rag to her face. The scent was cloying and sweet, coating her tongue and the back of her throat. She's read about this stuff. Ellie coughed and held her breath, trying to turn her face away. How the hell did he have chloroform? Her head started to spin and she wondered briefly when she started to breathe normally again, but her eyelids were so heavy and she didn't think she could hold on much longer. Why was she holding on again? What was she supposed to be doing? It was important, right? Where was Joel? Why wasn't he helping her? He always saved her when she got in trouble…
Let go. Just let go. Rest. You deserve it.
...Okay.
Ellie woke up to a headache from hell and a sound like tearing canvas. She sat up with a groan, then shifted to her knees and grabbed the bars in front of her, leaning forward to peer out into the rest of the room.
A man in dark clothing was sawing into meat on the butcher block in the middle of the room, his back to her. Oh. So that's what that-
He brought a cleaver down hard and shoved a human hand off the block to the floor, where it joined a pair of feet.
Oh, god.
Ellie shoved herself back from the door, bile burning at the back of her throat. If she had anything to throw up, she would have. The man paused mid-swing and looked over his shoulder at her. James. He scoffed at her and set down his cleaver, walking out of the room. Ellie got to her feet and tried the door, pushing against the chain with everything she had. It didn't budge.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
She paced in front of the door, testing the chain link as she passed. If she threw her weight against it...Who was she kidding? There was no way for her to get out undetected, and no means to fight whoever she came across. Ellie was on their home turf and at one hell of a disadvantage. She turned and reached through the bars of the door, pulling on the lock anyway.
"How are you feeling?"
Ellie stepped away from the door like it had spontaneously combusted as David approached, a tray in hand.
"Super," she replied. If by super one meant they'd been hit by a train and shit on for good measure.
"Here," David said, sliding the tray into her cell under the door. "You should eat."
Her stomach rumbled. The smell was intoxicating, but she looked over his shoulder at the corpse on the butcher block and her appetite disappeared.
"I know you're hungry; you've been out for quite some time."
"What is it?"
"It's deer." Bullshit.
"With some human helping on the side?"
David sighed and shook his head, smiling. "No. No, I promise. It's...It's just the deer meat."
Like promises are worth anything more than the breath wasted to make them.
"You're a fucking animal," Ellie snarled, crouching beside the tray. She didn't want to eat anything he gave her, but she hadn't eaten in two days and needed to get her strength up. She settled for picking the beans off and eating those, not wanting to take a gamble with the meat. The irony of her statement wasn't lost on her, considering that she was the one in the cage and tearing into her food with such ferocity.
"That's awfully quick to judgement," he said, kneeling to stay on eye-level with her. "Considering you and your friend killed how many men?"
Guilt jolted through her before she could push it away. Anger followed hot on its heels, familiar and emboldening.
"They didn't give us a choice," Ellie snapped. They never did. They always shoot first and then she and Joel have to kill them.
"And you think we have a choice? Is that it?"
Ellie drank from the cup, the cold water helping to lessen the incessant pounding in her head.
"You kill to survive, and so do we," he explained patiently. "We have to take care of our own. By any means necessary."
Oh, that's rich. The military used the same damn excuse to cover up murdering people.
"So now what?" she asked coldly, setting the cup down. "You gonna chop me up into tiny pieces?"
David chuckled humorlessly. "I'd rather not."
He looked at her almost appreciatively, smiling softly. "Please tell me your name."
Ellie shoved the tray back under the bars violently and stood. "You're so full of shit."
"On the contrary," David said, picking up the mess. She laid her hands on the bars in front of her. "I've been, ah, quite honest with you."
He set the tray to the side and stood up. "Now I think it's your turn. It's the only way I'm going to convince the others."
What? He wasn't saying… "Convince them of what?"
"That you can come around."
Oh fuck, he was.
"You have heart. You're loyal." He walked forward and laid his hand over hers, smiling. "And you're special."
His hand was cool and dry, but the touch still made her skin crawl. She was half a second from pulling away when she had an idea. It was dumb as hell, but the only one she had.
"Oh." Ellie hesitantly smiled back and put her other hand over his. His smile doubled, and that's when she snapped his index finger. He shouted and tried to pull away, but she wouldn't let go. Not yet. Not until she had those keys at his belt. She reached through the bars with her left hand, her shoulder feeling like liquid fire had been poured across it. She squeezed her eyes shut and her fingers closed around metal. Ellie pulled and tried to get the keys off the bungee, but David grabbed her arm and slammed her against the metal door until she let go. She fell to the floor and he rescued his keys, striding a few paces away to inspect his finger.
"Fuck." The word was carried on the edge of a sob, her voice wavering. She had one shot and fucked it up. Now she was going to die and Joel would be left all alone and she can't do that to him, she still had to give him the picture and-
Take a breath. Calm down. There's always a way.
"You stupid little girl," David hissed, his voice cracking. "You are making it very difficult to keep you alive. What am I supposed to tell the others now?"
Her headache had come back with a vengeance and she just knew she'd have a colorful assortment of bruises and one hell of a black eye in the morning. If she lived that long. Ellie swiped at her throbbing nose and felt rather than heard the break in the cartilage grind together. Her hand came away bloody.
"Ellie," she said. David turned to look at her with a half-angry-half-confused expression.
"What?"
"Tell them that Ellie is the little girl...who broke your fucking finger!"
David laughed and she could have swore the temperature of the room dropped ten degrees.
"How'd you put it?" he asked rhetorically, grinning maliciously. "'Tiny pieces?' See you in the mornin', Ellie."
He left and Ellie scooted into a corner, folding her sleeve over her hand and holding it under her bloody nose. She hung her head, the anger draining away, leaving her cold and miserable. She was going to die. She was going to die and it would be for nothing. She shifted and something crinkled in her pocket.
Ellie fished out the piece of paper and unfolded it, then sucked in a sharp breath. It was the picture. The picture. She stared for a long moment at the little girl she never knew and the man Joel once was, then folded it back up and stuck it in her pocket.
No. It wasn't for nothing.
