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lovers-spit-left-on-repeat · 10 months

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nonbeliever; ellie williams.

chapter two - waiting hours.

series masterlist

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art = @sunsbleeding

summary: A name is scratched from the list.

general warnings/notes: language, violence, brief gore, cursing, death, weapons (guns, knives, axe), familial issues, mentions of religion/implied religious trauma, implied suicidal thoughts.

word count: 6.4k

Isolation was nothing foreign to Amaya. She felt its breeze throughout childhood, recognized its kiss when the Abel curse sang true, and saw it in the mirror every waking moment. In the grey walls of the FEDRA military academy, Riley and a then 9-year-old Amaya had shared a room, but the youngest Abel was certain her older sister slept in someone else’s every night. She just didn’t know it was Ellie William’s, whose roommate was thrown into the “hole” and never came back. Fuck her, Amaya would repeat in a mantra once the clock passed 10 o’clock, too late for there to be a chance for Riley to shuffle through their door. It’s her choice. However shitty.

When the sun rose, she would get up with her alarm, haze through her day like a ghost, and only come alive once the clock’s arms skidded past 4. She called the window of time the Waiting Hours, where Amaya would bask in the silence of her solitude on her rickety bed and stare at the doorway in expectance. Riley only came through it twice.

The first time was the day following their arrival. After eight hours of school and training like the girl hadn’t become Death itself barely a week prior, Amaya was glacierized upon her bed. She pressed herself further and further into the metal frame but felt no pain, no sting of cold from the chilled brass. She waited and watched and when her eyes grew heavy, Amaya dug her nails into her palms until the blood pooling in the divots was enough to keep her up. It wasn’t until after dark when Riley arrived.

Her head hung low, she shuffled in. Whether it was in shame or grief, Amaya didn’t know. Riley grimaced as she dropped her hunched body onto her bed, still unmade from the night before. She turned away from her younger sister, features drowned in the shadows of the dim room.

“Riley?” Amaya whispered, her voice not yet vacant of childish wonder. Her sister stayed firmly in the shadows for a couple of seconds, then finally turned, allowing the flickering desk lamp to unveil her true nature. A bruise, purple and swelling, burrowed itself over Riley’s watering left eye. It, unlike the shadows that she left behind, was all-consuming, like all that made her face up was that violent, aggressive black eye. Amaya was silent. Even as Riley turned back around and fell onto her pillow. Even as the hour reached that of ungodliness. Even as her sister left with the sun’s call.

She didn’t know why she offered nothing, but this wasn’t her sister. This was not the girl she grew up with, hiccuping laughter and rebellious grins accompanying every sentence. This was a stranger who just happened to be violently familiar. Riley didn’t come back the next night, or the hundreds that followed, and the guilt was sharp against her veins. So Amaya learned some first aid. She took out nearly a hundred books on all types of burns, bruises, and breaks at the academy library, hoping that maybe next time Riley returned with a black eye, Amaya’s skills would be enough to convince her sister to stay.

The second time Riley came back was a little over two years later, in the peak of the morning’s glow. There was no black eye this time, but trembling hands and bleeding knuckles. Riley, now almost fourteen, was starting to look more and more like their mother; thin braids wrapped back by green fabric, full cheeks, and freckles kissing the bridge of her nose. She stood in the doorway like she didn’t belong there, then shuffled passed where a dumbfounded Amaya sat at her cluttered desk. Riley fell onto the nearest bed, which was exactly how she left it; unmade, cold, empty. She looked at her sister, and Amaya understood.

Ignoring the sting of angry tears and ringing of unsaid chastising that ricochetted in her head, Amaya pulled the bandages and stolen gauze from the readied box under her bed and ripped a piece from her already frayed bed sheet. Slow and careful, like Riley was some rabid beast ready to lunge, Amaya stepped towards her sister and kneeled at her feet. Hands still shaking and dripping onto the wooden panels, Riley faced them toward the ceiling, displaying two crooked fingers that quaked with very shuttering breath. The work was done quickly, and not without tears or groans. When she was finished, Amaya forced Riley to lay back on the bed and tucked the covers up to her shoulders like their father used to do.

In the morning, she was gone again.

In the morning, Amaya first felt the paralysis. In its first wave, she was alone, but not without the ghost of her sister staring back at her.

In the morning, once the chill of stillness has thawed, Amaya moved to sit at her desk again, where she kept a small mirror. A face, ever-patchy and dull, the grey twinge of stress creeping along her hairline despite her young age, stared back at her. Like Riley, this girl wasn’t the one she grew up with. Or maybe she had always been there, festering beneath the surface. Either way, she never vanished, even three years later when there was no hope that Riley might come home.

To be alone is to be unburdened, her mother used to say, ever a poet. But Amaya had never felt a burden greater than this isolation and was becoming so familiar that she might as well start calling it a sister. And now, trekking across a highway of overgrowth and decay, surrounded by three more strangers, she wished for nothing more than to be alone.

Her axe heaving with the weight of longing for its original owner, Amaya swore her bones grew heavier with every step. Maybe it was because of the head wound or how she hadn’t slept since Boston, but this fatigue was past physical; whatever life she had left in her was slowly dissipating, seeping from her veins and pouring from her fingertips. So slow, that it felt like it would take a million years to finally deplete. Amaya wondered what crimes she might have committed in past lifetimes that would warrant such a punishment, but quickly remembered the atrocities of this one. With the hundredth huff of the afternoon, Amaya slogged on.

“Has the bleeding stopped?” Amaya resisted the urge to look at the sienna eyes that unabashedly stared her down. Ellie, who was about as well-rested as the taller girl had ever seen her, hadn’t strayed from her side since leaving their temporary camp on the outskirts of the city. She was there when they’d seen how the sun’s magnificence bounced from the glass panels turning eroding skyscrapers into statues of divinity. She was there when Tess made them stop to reapply the bandage haloed around Amaya’s head (as she bit down on a piece of cloth to muffle the groans, Amaya wondered if the tears were from the pain of her wound of the sheer ferocity of the fire in Ellie’s stare). She was there now, even as Amaya tried to lose her between Joel and Tess.

“I’m fine,” was all Amaya could push out. In some odd way, she was relieved that Ellie was close. Tess and Joel could handle the four of them fine, but deep underneath the cloth of time and memory, Amaya wanted to be near in case of danger. For the promise.

Protect Ellie.

Amaya tried to speed up for the millionth time, but her lack of energy and the fact that Ellie seemed determined to stay barely an arm’s length away drowned her efforts away. As Ellie glanced over for the umpteenth time, she wondered how skeletal she might look now as the sun seemed to make everything glow but her. Lost in her thoughts, she missed Ellie calling to Tess and Joel for a short break and was thankful when they all found a place to sit.

Pulling herself up on the closest abandoned car hood, Ellie leaned against the one opposite to her.

“You should’ve slept,” she chastised as metal creaked beneath her weight.

“Would you rather have been completely vulnerable and have a bullet in your skull right now?”

As Ellie dreamed as peacefully as she could on a patch of grass hours prior, Amaya stayed awake on her armchair just out of reach of the sunlight pouring from the opening in the ceiling. Half to prevent a ghost from staring her down when she woke up, half because she knew now what Joel and Tess were capable of; after Amaya was lucid enough to question where the FEDRA guard went, Ellie filled her in. She pictured her and Ellie’s bodies buried somewhere, the adults finally worn tired of their antics, then realized that Joel and Tess probably wouldn’t even have to decency to give them a proper burial.

After slapping on the small watch Marlene packed in her bag, she counted down the hours until daybreak, watching Ellie’s chest rise and fall as the wisps of hair that escaped her ponytail flowed over her face in waves when the wind chose tranquility.

Ellie grimaced. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know them. If they wanted to get rid of us, it’d be an easy fight.”

Ellie hummed in dissent, a grin beginning to creep its way up her cherubic face. “You did some damage with that rock last night.”

Amaya turned her face toward the sun to hide a grin of her own. “Only ‘cause I’ve been running on adrenaline and canned beans for the last few weeks.

A silence settled over them and a voice reminded her that she was not allowed peace. Her legacy was not one of stillness and quiet.

“Come on,” Tess called as Joel glowered behind her. “We’re losing light.”

It was barely afternoon yet, but Amaya was thankful for the excuse to ignore the prying of the ghosts that made her up.

“Where the fuck are they already?” Ellie asked from a few feet ahead of Amaya. They had been walking for three hours now, and it was like the sun was glaring especially bright just to make her headache worse. From where she stood in their line, Joel taking up the back and Tess the front, she peered out towards the wreckage of Boston. However colorless and broken down, the view was calming. The beauty in chaos, as Maria would have called it.

“You’ll know it when they’re close,” Tess called back.

“I didn’t know last time,” Ellie mumbled. But Amaya did. She had known, looked it straight in its yellow, veiny eye. How could she miss the beast when its claws, fangs, and evil were born from her blood?

“How did you get bit?” Tess inquired. If Amaya’s stomach hadn’t dropped before, it was plummeting now. A chill settling over her shoulders, she slid past the pair and claimed a spot at the front of their procession.

Her anonymity, her erasure from this narrative was the one thing Ellie could grant if she chose to. Maybe even one thing she might deserve in the eyes of whoever claimed holiness in a world of iniquitousness. Amaya’s eyes fell to her feet as her nerves rattled.

“You know the old mall in the QZ?” Ellie began, and Amaya’s nerves rattled.

“The one that’s sealed off and boarded up, and no one’s supposed to go in…ever? That the right one?”

“Whatever,” Ellie sighed. “I snuck in, wanted to see what it was like. Didn’t think there was gonna be anything in there, and then one just came at me outta nowhere. Thought I got away, but…”

“So it was just you in there, alone?”

“Yeah,” she said and Amaya unclenched her calloused hands, pretending not to notice specks of blood in the crescent-shaped creases. But Ellie’s gaze rested on her, and that’s how she knew she was fucked. Amaya could feel it; blistering and sharp enough to cut all the blood from her body. But the odd thing about it was when it came to comparing the sun’s glare and hers, only one could raise the dead within her.

Tess said nothing more, and the older woman might not have connected the dots fully, but there was a knowing glint in her bruised eyes when Amaya briefly pivoted to look back at the rest of the group. So much for secrets.

The quartet eventually reached Tess and Joel’s choice lookout spot; 20 stories of mold infestations and mildew. The hotel, complete with a makeshift pond in the lobby and a new biohazard on each floor, was probably a hot spot for all types of disease and infection. As they moved up ten flights of groaning stairs, Amaya had to refrain from raising her shirt over her nose.

“Fuck,” Tess heaved as they reached the landing and Joel cleared the hallway.

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad,” Ellie teased as she looked back at Amaya, smirking at her struggle up the last step.

“You try climbing ten fuckin’ floors with our knees, see how you feel.”

Water dripped from the ceiling and sunlight shone through fogged windows. Amaya leaned against the door frame and panted, her mind shot back to the Fireflies’ base in the city. However unwelcoming, she was starting to miss it. The group rounded the corner into a dimly lit hall to find their path blocked by a caved-in ceiling.

“Well, when the fuck did that happen?” Tess grumbled as Joel began to poke around the rubble with the mouth of his gun. Once they discovered that both doors that paralleled the group were jammed shut, Tess proposed that she climb through a small gap in the rubble and snake her way to the other side, but Ellie objected.

“Well, I’m the smallest so it’d be easier for me to get through,” she reasoned.

Tess tilted her head and Ellie sighed, knowing her answer before she even opened her lips. “You die and we get nothing. You stay.”

“What about me?” Amaya proposed, voice hoarse from the lack of talking. “I’m only a little bit taller than Ellie and the Fireflies don’t need me, anyway.

“What about that Maria woman?”

Amaya looked down at her palms, still stained with the red tint of guilt. Did she have something waiting beyond this? A sister, a family, a life? Since finding out about the possibility that Maria managed to survive the past 5 years, she’d been trying to stop the pessimistic thoughts, but just because there was hope, didn’t mean there wasn’t sorrow to come. Amaya kept thinking about her ‘paradise in hell’ and wondered if it was just doublespeak for an unforgiving afterlife.

“No point in searching for someone who’s probably dead,” she abridged.

Tess considered her with concern for a moment before shoving her pack into the younger girl’s hands. “You both stay,” she commanded and began her ascent.

Ellie looked at her with worry in her eyes. Despite the flutter of her ashed heart, Amaya did nothing but shrug and lean against the wall as Joel boosted Tess up. A few awkwardly silent moments passed and Ellie moved to sit by Amaya’s feet like she had back in the QZ. Steadily growing more bored each second her sullen companions remained silent, she started flipping her switchblade in the air.

“Nice knife” Joel grumbled out. Ellie paused, looked at him, then continued her act. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“The circus.”

Joel and Amaya gave an exasperated sigh in sync, causing Ellie to roll her eyes.

“Where are you from?” she asked, less in kindness and more in obligation. Joel began to grumble a response, but Amaya's attention, ever vigilant, was captured by something other than small talk and sienna eyes.

Her axe glinted as shards of gold sliced through the rumble, creating ribbons of rippling fire across the walls like back in her childhood room. When she allowed a brief glance at Ellie’s eyes, no difference existed between them and the glow. The beginnings of a smile twinged at the sides of Amaya's lips but quickly vanished when she realized Joel was watching her.

“Where’d you get it?” He wondered, probably the kindest words he’d ever said to her. Amaya watched him for a second, looking for any pinch of ingenuity in his stare. She found nothing.

“Off some dead guy,” she feigned nonchalantness.

“Yeah,” Ellie continued, “after she killed him.”

Joel raised a brow in suspicion as Amaya, lips thinned, looked at the girl incredulously.

“What?” Ellie whispered, but not quiet enough for Joel to miss. “I’m trying to make you look tough!”

Amaya rolled her eyes and stalked off down the hall, losing her battle against a grin as Ellie continued to describe to Joel all the ways her accomplice could kill a man. She wandered into a guest room, which was just as pristine as the lobby. Dragging her fingers across the ledge of a rusted mirror, Amaya wondered what it might’ve been like here on outbreak day, what the panic of being away from home might’ve felt like. Cold and heavy and ardent, she supposed. Not exactly unfamiliar.

She settled herself on what was left of the mattress, carefully dodging the suspicious stains by the foot of the bed, and let the tension flow from her muscles. To be alone was to be unburdened, she remembered, even when this room screamed death and decay. The open window flowed nature’s breath against the torn fabric of the curtain, and on the dresser, a small piece of paper quivered. Deciding to entertain her curiosity, Amaya leaned across the bed and picked it up. For the second time in two days, she would soon wish she hadn’t let eagerness win.

On the backside of the yellowing polaroid four words were scrawled— “Super Sammy - 2019”. The handwriting looked like that of someone her age; messily looped and barely legible. Amaya flipped the picture over to reveal a young boy who couldn’t be older than 10. His brown skin was of the same shade as hers and one of his front teeth was missing. Despite the holes in his shirt, he smiled up at the camera like sunshine itself. Over his eyes, colored in with red marker, was a mask like Amaya had seen on superheroes in the few children’s books she had back in New Jersey. If it weren’t for the grey, eroding setting behind the boy, the picture could’ve been from a time when all someone had to worry about was taxes. Amaya didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone so happy.

“Amaya?” Ellie’s voice rang out from down the hall and she was throttled back into her reality; mildew, mold, and monstrosities. She shoved the picture into her back pocket where it rested against The List and hurried back to the group.

Once Tess unjammed the door separating her from the rest of the group, she led them past the wreckage and to a plastic-shrouded balcony. As soon as she slipped by the plastic which Tess held back, her sinuses were overwhelmed with the smell of rot from the enveloping plants as a lofty buzzing filled the air. Ellie eagerly rushed to the ledge and leaned so far forward, Amaya was tempted to pull her back by the sleeve of her jacket. The older girl looked back to Tess and Joel, who stood looking out on the city with solemn expressions.

“What?” She questioned and tightened her hold on her axe. Tess shook her head and walked up beside her.

“You see that?” The woman pointed to the patch of yellowing grass between two crumbling rows of houses. Confused, Amaya squinted, before realizing her mistake in recognition. It wasn’t a patch of grass. The strange buzzing wasn’t the wind and the smell of rot wasn’t from the encompassing nature. A herd of infected, maybe a hundred of them, lay on the concrete in close quarters like they were one unit. Some slithered, some were motionless. But all of them hissed with a hunger that ran for generations. If Riley were with them. she would’ve joked that it was just another Abel family reunion.

“I thought that was just more overgrowth…” Amaya mumbled and stepped away from the ledge.

“The last time we were here they were still deep inside the buildings.”

“And how long ago was that?” Ellie wondered. The sun passed over the herd and they squirmed, screeches echoing louder like they were being burned alive.

“…Three weeks.”

Ellie hummed in response and joined Amaya on leveled ground. “So we’re not going that way, huh?”

“No,” Tess sighed.

“What do we do then?” Ellie's eyes widened as she remembered their other option. “The short way?”

“Museum.”

Squashed between ivy-covered rubble, the building didn’t exactly look welcoming. Windows punched in and the door ajar, patches and vines of cordyceps snaked over its brick face. Amaya eyed it suspiciously and backed the group like merely peering up at the clusters would send her into a murderous frenzy.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ellie frowned.

“There’s a way across from the top floor.”

Joel stepped passed Amaya and punched the butt of his gun into the nearest cluster of fungi, which cracked and caved in, releasing a puff of dust. Amaya took another five steps back. The last time she was this close to the fungus, there was blood on her hands when the sun rose.

“It’s bone dry,” Joel stood. “It could mean they’re all finally dead in there.”

He and Tess bent down and swung their packs down to the knees, pulling out flashlights. Amaya did the same.

“Marlene pack you one of these or just sandwiches?”

Kneeling on the ground, Amaya sifted through her bag, packing and unpacking, until she realized that there was no flashlight. She groaned and slumped against her legs.

“You can have mine,” Ellie reached her torch out to the frustrated girl. “Nothing’s gonna happen to me even if I can’t see them coming.”

Tess peered back at her. “You’re not immune from being ripped apart. You understand?”

A silence settled over the group and Ellie pressed her chapped lips together. Distantly, Amaya could still hear the infected’s hissing. She raised herself from the vine-covered ground and readied her axe. They proceeded through the door.

Littered with dust and a few bodies of infected, their heads caved and limbs webbed together like some fucked-up version of an embrace, Ellie and Amaya stayed close to each other. They stalked through the first hall, eyes sharp, and only saw a single body. Amaya quickly concluded that he had been shot outside of the museum and simply crawled inside, seeking a quiet place to die. Until she saw the claw marks and Tess’s words ricocheted around her head. With a push of her arm, she forced Ellie in front of her as Amaya kept an eye on the darkness slowly swallowing the hall behind her.

Silent as instructed, they climbed the stairs. As they creaked, the ceiling gave an aching groan, dust loosening like snow above the group. Like the herd back in the open, a cluster of infected bunched together on the second landing. Yellowing tendrils stretched from their empty eye sockets and mouths. Luckily they had fused with the rest of the rubble and no hissing could be heard besides that of Amaya’s pulse, but Joel’s shoulders remained squared.

A crunch echoed and everyone froze. Looking down, she saw Ellie’s converse-clad foot over the hollow hand of one of the beasts. The ceiling groaned again, but not with age—-with the presence of something ancient and wicked. Quicker this time, Joel crept up the remaining stairs and hurried to creak the door open, but as soon as he was passed the doorway, the ceiling gave a final lurch. Within two seconds, dust, beams, and concrete hailed down as Ellie and Tess flung themselves passed the doorframe. Amaya, who had been peering down the steps, had no time to react. If she had moved barely a foot, the wooden beam that swung tauntingly would’ve pierced right through her.

Amaya could faintly hear Ellie’s muffle voice yelling her name, but all she could process was her heavy breathing. “Fuck,” she panted and started to claw at the ruin, only giving up when her palms started to tear. “Fuck!”

Then, a screech. Sharp and pitched like a bird’s call, bloody and desperate like a starving animal. All was still. There was no shuffling on the other side of the ruin. Ellie didn’t dare yell for her and Amaya didn’t dare breathe. As the breath caught in her throat, she turned her head to look through the settling dust and down the stairs.

When the clicking started, Amaya ran.

She could hear the beast barrelling up the stairs and knew to not look back until she reached the dead end of the hallway. Swerving left and right, she prayed for a place to take shelter, and for the first time in her life, her wish was granted. Amaya barrelled through the narrow doorway to her left and practically fused herself with the wall. The room was doorless and nearly pitch black. On the other side of the wall where Joel, Tess, and Ellie might be, more screeching rasped. But they had guns and flashlights. They weren’t alone. All Amaya had was an axe she didn’t know how to wield and ghosts, who she soon would join.

The beast was up the staircase now and barely even ten feet away. It clicked and rasped as it stalked down the hall. Amaya clamped her mouth shut and it was just like the day before at the QZ, but this time, Ellie’s warmth couldn’t be felt. Amaya was alone. She was going to die alone.

Right next to her ear, the beast clicked and beckoned her toward fate. It should have been you. It should have been you.

Amaya supposed Riley’s voice could only mean that death was creeping closer and anger began to brew in her stomach. This wasn’t fucking fair. Not even 24 hours after she was told that Maria might still be alive, she was inches away from her own demise. It didn’t matter that she, regardless of Riley and Marlene’s claims, was likely rotting somewhere—a mirror of beast beside her.

She could let it happen as she would have let Marlene kill her back at the QZ. Maybe fate would spare her and make it quick. Or maybe it would take its time as it had with her sister, her mother, her father. It clicked again like it was trying to tell her something in morse code. Amaya remembered then the stolen book still in her bag, waiting to be read. She remembered how Riley has wanted to learn when they were young but gave up after a day. She remembered the picture of Super Sammy in her pocket. Would he give up this easily? No. Super Sammy was a believer in hope, not fate. A saint amongst sinners. He would not cower like she was.

Fate was like a father to her; absent when she needed it, glaring and unabashed when she wanted to be left alone. And she wasn’t going to let it win this time.

Whipping herself around the corner as she should’ve done when Joel and Tess first intruded at the Firefly base, Amaya stuck it in the neck. Not enough to kill it, but enough to send it reeling back into the wall. She stuck her foot into its stomach and yanked the axe from its neck, sending blood squirting into her face. Amaya had almost forgotten that she was 14 and inexperienced.

The clicking beast screamed with more terror and grabbed her by her shoulders, pushing her to the floor, and pinned her arms above her head. Amaya screamed for Joel, for Tess, for Ellie, but no one would come. She was alone. She was going to die alone.

Amaya was fed up. Of being left behind, of only knowing anger and sadness as friends. She was fed up with fate and faith, with chance and luck. This wasn’t fucking fair. So she did what she did best—-swung until she saw red.

Reaching to her left where her axe had fallen, she plowed it into its shoulder, into its chest, back into its neck. When it fell motionless, she didn’t stop. She kneeled over it, screaming and swinging, never taking her eyes off its face. Hair patched around the remnants of its scalp and it still had a single eye intact. Brown, like Ellie’s. Like Maria’s. Like Riley’s.

When she was finished, she took her damn time to try and find a way to the other side of the rubble. Eventually, she stumbled upon a jammed door, and on the other side, gunshots echoed against screaming—-Ellie’s screaming. Amaya slammed her body against the door until it gave way, revealing an infected toppled over her and Joel as they struggled. Amaya slammed her axe down again and this time it landed in the dead center of its skull.

Panting, she didn’t care to retrieve her weapon. She looked down at Joel and Ellie, who only stared back.

“What the fuck was that?” She asked. No response was given. Ellie was still staring. Not at her, Amaya quickly realized, but at the blood that patterned itself across her brown skin. She could taste it on her lips, feel it drip from a spot on her cheek. Weapon, killer, monster. **

You killed them, May.

Amaya quickly turned away from them and wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. Behind her, the beast began to screech again and drag itself, impaled head and all, towards her. Tess, who had just rounded the corner with a gun of her own, delivered the final shot.

Amaya stared at her victim in silence. Once everyone was breathing normally, Joel asked “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Amaya glowered. “Thanks for fucking leaving me by the way.”

Her eyes flew from person to person but came to rest on Ellie. Amaya’s ears burned as she blinked rapidly. She knew that the pile of rock and wood between them would have withstood anything Ellie might’ve thrown at it, but still. Amaya would have tried. If not for the stupid promise, then for her own sake.

Ellie looked like she wanted to say something, but Tess stilled and pointed to her wrist.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ellie rolled up her shirt sleeve to reveal another bite mark and Amaya had to resist going off on her. Riley was barely even bitten and it took four hours for her to be gone. Ellie had now been bitten twice, and nothing would happen. She wouldn’t start to twitch as Riley did. She wouldn’t lose control of her mind, her body… this wasn’t fucking fair.

“Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

On the roof of her almost grave, Amaya stared out at Boston again, growing further and further away from what rooted her there. With her red-tinted gaze, it was getting harder to see all that beauty Maria would talk about.

Joel and Tess sat by the windowsill and splinted Tess’s sprained ankle, but the pair kept looking at Amaya across the makeshift bridge. Maybe in anticipation for Ellie’s sanity to crumble, maybe in shame for abandoning Amaya. Probably not the latter. i

She tried to put as much space between her and Ellie, but it was like she magnetically attracted tragedies; she could feel Ellie’s gaze and didn’t have to think twice about who was cautiously coming up behind her.

“I’m sorry,” was all she said. No explanation and, Amaya was trying to convince herself, no remorse. The state house glowed almost as maliciously as her thoughts.

Without considering Ellie’s presence any longer, Amaya spun to Joel and Tess. “We should keep moving. The sun’s starting to go down.”

The place was fucking deserted. First, it was the odd silence, then the empty truck, then the blood on the steps. And lastly, the bodies. Ridden with gunshot wounds and in pools of their own barely settled blood, their stares were black. Upon seeing the corpses, Amaya rushed to inspect each one, looking for familiar locs of black hair.

“Shit,” she kept whispering as she sailed to the next body. The last one was a man, barely over twenty with dark hair on his shoulders. His eyes had gone grey and angry veins crawled up the side of his face. Amaya released her lungs from the clutches of fear when she saw nothing familiar.

“One of them was bit,” she called to the rest of the group. Tess was frantically searching through the dead Fireflies’ supplies and quickly turned on the girls.

“Where did Marlene say she was taking you?” She demanded.

“Just west,” Amaya mumbled cautiously.

“Just west. Fuck. Okay.” She ran a hand through her greying hair. “And what about that Maria woman? Where’s she supposed to be?”

“I…I don’t know. The only people who did are dead now.”

Grateful that her sister wasn’t amongst them, she hadn’t had the chance to consider what this meant for her. Maria wasn’t there. There was no one alive able to tell her where she was last. She no longer had any point of direction.

“One of them has got to have a map on them, right?” Tess continued panicking. “Joel, can you help me?”

“It’s over, Tess. It’s over. We’re going home.”

“That’s not my fucking home!”

Amaya’s fingers wrapped tight around the hilt of her axe as she distanced herself in front of Ellie, who had slowly sailed to her side. Joel’s silence was unlike the quiet that was constantly settled over his shoulders; he watched Tess, who kept backing away, with his lips parted, but he could not speak, paralyzed with something Amaya knew well—-otherness.

Tess raised her chin and stood. “I’m staying. I mean…our luck had to run out sooner or later.”

“Fuck.” Ellie whispered. “She’s infected.”

“Show me,” was all Joel could work past his lips. Tess pulled down the collar of her red button-up and showcased the beginnings of decay. Veiny and angry, the red tendrils were already creeping up her neck.

“Take your bandage off,” the marred woman commanded. Ellie, eyes heavy with memory, sighed and did as she was told. Just as Amaya dreaded, her bite was just that—a bite. No redness, no vines of malice.

“Joel, this is real,” Tess continued. She held her arm up against Ellie’s and pulled her forward in display like a circus animal. When her arm started to shake, she flopped it to her side. “Joel, she’s fucking real…I need you to get her to Bill and Frank’s.”

“No.”

“They’ll take her off your hands. They’ll know what to do.”

Unsure of her place in this discussion, Amaya mumbled, “My sister—”

“I’m sorry, Amaya, but you’re sister is probably fucking dead. You said it yourself. Go with them. Stay with Ellie, protect Ellie.”

Amaya shut her mouth in a snap. She’d almost forgotten. As Joel shook his head like a screw was loose in his neck and Tess repeated ‘they’ll know what to do’ like she was trying to convince herself. Amaya was back in the mall.

Staring at the marbled title, Amaya thought of her victims. Two she forbade herself from thinking about for more than a few seconds, one who she killed barely an hour ago. Was the person-turned-beast from the museum once a parent? A child? A sibling? Had she been staring at some fucked-up version of foreshadowing the whole time? And was Tess not the same now? Was Riley not the same?

Amaya was no stranger to guilt, and she knew Ellie wasn’t either. Why her and why not those who deserved preservation? The reason Riley had been in the mall in the first place was to make her happy. Not as deep down as she’d like rested a red-hot resentment of the girl, but also a sense of comradery, a connection born of tragedy. Their lifelines connected the moment Amaya decided to step foot in that goddamned mall and it would remain intertwined for the rest of their lives. She shouldn’t blame someone that was practically a mirror of herself. But now, as Tess’s eyes began to water, Amaya felt a deep sorrow for the girl.

She only came alive when a bullet sliced through the skull of the awakened Firefly by Ellie’s feet. They were all still for a second as the feeling of foreboding settled in the air. Something was happening. Something was awakening. Not too far in the distance, the hissing began again. Joel hurried to the door, poked his head out, and returned with his stony eyes set on one thing—Ellie.

Amaya raised her axe past her waist and assumed her position in front of the girl. Her head pivoted between Tess and Joel. If she hadn’t been scared of them before, she was now. Tess wouldn’t be able to buffer Joel’s rage and apathy this time.

“How many?” Tess asked in an eerily calm tone.

“All of them. We got maybe a minute.”

Tess began knocking open the barrels the Fireflies left behind until the circle of them created a sour-smelling brown river over the floor, pooling in the divots of the marble. As she dropped a crate of grenades over the substance and pulled a rusty lighter from her pants pocket, Amaya realized her plan. She was making sure they wouldn’t follow.

Tess closed in on an emotionless Joel and whispered to him. He stared at the woman for the few seconds he allowed himself, then turned on his heel and grabbed ahold of Ellie. Amaya moved to protest, raising her axe above her shoulders, but a quivering hand rested itself on her shoulder.

She felt like the biggest fucking hypocrite. Five minutes ago, she had been storming about them abandoning her back in the museum despite knowing there was nothing they could have done. Now, staring into the eyes of a woman cursed, she was doing unto them as they did unto her. But this was Tess’s choice. If her death had to come, it would be by her own hands.

Ashamed, Amaya looked down to see the glass of her watch glimmering. 5:32, it read. Just on time. It was the Waiting Hours, but it was her turn to leave. With one last glance, Amaya hurried away.

Without her knowing the name was even on it, Tess was scratched from the list.

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