Author's Note: This chapter has a scene containing graphic sexual content (that involves Ellie). If you're uncomfortable with material depicting teenage sexuality, you might want to skip the very last scene. Otherwise, read on and review, as always! I appreciate all the feedback and dedicated readership, you guys :)

The supplies they got at the radio tower kept them going for about a week and a half, the way Ellie figured it, before Joel woke her up one day with a half-full tin of syrupy black beans in one hand and their dented travel spoon in the other.

"Last can," he informed her grimly.

After Pittsburgh, they'd been trying to stay out of big cities, and even smaller areas that had once been settled. Mostly the days consisted of hiking through dense trees and down hillsides, or following the interstate and then taking the long way around when buildings started to loom on the horizon. When going through a city couldn't be avoided, they stuck to skirting across outlying farms, and slept in barns at night.

But food was a problem. To get more, they'd have to go into a town, and Ellie could tell Joel wasn't any more excited about the idea than she was.

It was actually pretty uncommon to run into infected out in the wilderness, but it got worse and worse the more roads, houses and buildings were gathered in one place. Anywhere civilization had been, the fungus flourished.

With their food supply tapped out, though, it looked like they were going to have to risk it.

"There should be a town a few miles on," explained Joel while Ellie chewed over the last of the beans, slowly, turning them to paste before swallowing to make them last longer. "We'll see if we can pick up some supplies there and then push for the border."

"Sounds good," Ellie agreed. "I'm totally okay with getting the fuck out of Ohio. This state sucks."

Actually, every place she'd been outside of Boston had pretty much sucked. And Boston had sucked too. The only real high point was getting to see sprawling open country she hadn't even known existed – but there was a lot of it, and the past few days it had all looked pretty much the same.

They set out an hour later, after they'd broken their makeshift camp and Ellie got a chance to wake up all the way. She was surprised Joel didn't get her up at the crack of dawn every day, since getting to the Fireflies was kind of a time-sensitive thing, but he always seemed content to let her sleep. Just like in the truck, she reflected. Maybe he's being nice to me because of everything with Sam and Henry.

Or maybe he just didn't want to have to drag her half-awake ass around and be alert for both of them. She didn't like to think that he was babying her. It didn't seem like his style, anyway.

The town Joel had been talking about was farther than he made it sound. By the time they got there, the sun was high overhead, and Ellie was wiping clammy sweat off her forehead even in the chilly fall air.

As they trudged along, she grasped for something to take her mind off the ache in her feet, but all that came to her were thoughts of Sam and Henry.

Finally, desperate to think about something else, she remembered a conversation they'd had the other day. As reticent as Joel could be about his own past, he didn't seem to mind her questions about other subjects, like television and sports teams and libraries. Getting Joel to tell her about things from before had turned into one of her favorite pastimes.

"I wanna hear some more about the Internet," she announced.

The idea of a 'world-wide web' fascinated her. It sounded way more unreal than even the fairy tales she'd heard as a kid about gnomes and dragons and fairies. But Joel talked about it like it was no big deal.

"There ain't that much to tell. It was just something everybody used – kind of like ration cards. Believe it or not, people in my day would have thought waiting hours in line for food sounded crazy."

Ellie scoffed, smiling a little. "Bullshit! There's no way ration lines are crazier than everybody getting all their information from some magic invisible wire."

"Trust me, it's plenty crazy," muttered Joel.

"So, you're saying you used to be able to just…get food whenever you wanted it?"

"Uh-huh," he replied. "Watch your head."

Ellie ducked down under a branch he was holding off to the side, and saw they were at the edge of the woods already. There was a short drop where the ground cleaved off into a gully, and Joel helped her down with his hands on her waist. Ellie's stomach did a little flip-flop that she put off to hunger.

"Man, let's quit talking about food until we actually get some," she groaned dramatically. "I'd fight fifty fucking hunters for a can of those nasty beans right now."

"You think that's funny?"

"Sorry, jeez, it was a joke." She held up her hands in mock surrender.

Joel shook his head. "Look, this won't take long. Let's just focus up and try to get in and out in one piece, alright?"

In the distance, out across a stretch of brownish-gold fields, Ellie could see a scattering of buildings rising out of the earth.

It looked maybe another half hour away. She wondered if Joel knew this town, if he'd ever been through here, before. She knew he was from Texas, and that Texas was a long way from where they were now, but things were easy to get to in those days, weren't they?

"You don't just happen to have another buddy in this town we're going to get food from, do you?" she asked.

"That'd be nice, but no."

"Do we have any kind of a plan? Or are we just gonna go down all the streets until we see a store?"

Joel snorted.

"Ellie, we ain't goin' in any supermarkets."

"Why not? I've never seen one, and you said that's where all the food got kept. It'd be like breaking into a ration storehouse, except we wouldn't have to fight our way past a bunch of soldiers."

"Because," he explained, "they've all been raided years ago. What we find is gonna be in people's houses – if we find anything at all."

"Oh."

Somehow, that hadn't really occurred to Ellie.

When they'd learned about the infection in school – the outbreak, and how it had spread – it had sounded like it mainly hit big cities. In fact, they really only ever heard about what happened in other Quarantine Zones. It kind of made it sound like they were the only places affected.

Part of her had always held out the secret hope that there were some small towns like this one where the infected just never got to. Like maybe life was continuing on like nothing had changed, in little isolated pockets scattered around, and she and Joel just had to find one.

As a kid, back when she didn't know a lot about how Marlene's group actually worked – even less than she did now – she'd kind of thought that was how the Fireflies operated. That they worked out of some secret infection-proof base and went around trying to help everybody stuck on the outside with the fungus.

Even though she knew that was stupid, now, and that the Fireflies were mired in the same shit as everybody else and not at all immune to the infection, seeing this new town filled her with the same kind of irrational hope.

"Man," she sighed, "what I wouldn't give to get to see just one grocery store in mint condition. All that food in one place - that'd be fucking nuts!"

There was a smile in Joel's voice when he replied. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you about convenience stores."

"…Okay, I'll bite. What the fuck is that?"

o

It took the better part of the next twenty minutes for Joel to convince Ellie he wasn't pulling her leg about miniature grocery stores that stayed open twenty-four hours a day just so people could get snack food whenever they felt like it.

The whole idea was so far removed from what she was used to that she was sure he had to be fucking with her. Between scheduled meals at the military school and the half-starvation she'd been living with for the last two weeks, Ellie couldn't wrap her head around food you could get on a whim.

"You lived in strange times," she told him with a little shake of her head.

"Still do," Joel replied.

She had to give him that.

The conversation died off a little when they crossed into the outskirts of the town. Joel was on the lookout for infected, his shoulders stiff and alert, rifle at the ready. Ellie kept a hand on her own gun, and kept her voice down.

"Wow, this place is so different from Boston," she breathed.

All around were tiny houses with plain, rectangular shapes that looked like they must have been falling apart even before their occupants fled. Unlike in the suburbs, they were planted unevenly and far apart, like crooked teeth jutting out at odd angles.

"It ain't much of a town. But it had people, so with any luck, it'll have something for us."

"You sound pretty sure about that."

Joel approached a yellowish house on the left that still had a miniature windmill up in the front yard, and eased the screen door open carefully. "We'll see. C'mon."

A little less than enthusiastically, Ellie followed him in. The inside of the house was musty, and parts of the floor had collapsed. The two of them skirted around the edges of the main room, avoiding the open gaps in the linoleum, toward a little kitchenette that could be seen at the far end.

"This is one weird-ass house," commented Ellie. It was shaped exactly like a shoebox and seemed to have just one main room, except for a single hallway on the opposite end.

"We used to call these single-wides."

Joel was rifling through the cabinets already, a frown of concentration seated firmly on his forehead. "Probably not much in the way of food, but less likely to get raided, too. Bingo," he held up a can of something Ellie didn't recognize – yellow squares with jagged edges, covered in some kind of red sauce. "Used to eat this all the time. It's crap, but it'll keep you going."

She took the can, turning it over curiously before shoving it in her pack. "What else do we got?"

"Not much. We'll probably have to hit a few of these houses before we're full up. Then we can get out of here."

"Cool."

Wandering toward the hallway, Ellie poked around the bare walls and waterstained furniture.

There wasn't a lot to hold her interest in the place. Compared to the other abandoned houses she'd been in, this one was strange and kind of barren. It looked like somebody had grabbed all the photos off the walls before they took off, which struck her as a weird thing to grab. Why leave your food and take keepsakes instead?

Her hand went self-consciously to the folded knife in her back pocket. That was different, she told herself. Something easy to carry, sure, especially if it was useful. But a bunch of framed pictures…that was fucking crazy.

"Hey."

Lost in thought about the former owners of the house, Ellie jumped when Joel's voice came from right behind her shoulder.

"We're done here. You alright?"

She nodded quickly. "Yeah. Yeah, just…looking around."

"Well, let's go."

Everything was almost eerily silent as they moved on to the next three houses, two of which were a total bust.

On the one hand, it was nice to have a break from the rasping sounds of the infected that had followed them almost constantly back in the sewers. But it left Ellie waiting for the other shoe to drop. Somehow the woods were different. There, she could share a comfortable silence with Joel.

The infected didn't feel like they belonged with trees and rocks and open sky, and in the whole time she and Joel had been traveling in the wilderness, they'd hardly run into any, except when they went near a town.

But something about being in between four walls again made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. That's stupid, she told herself. We haven't seen any people or bodies here. If there aren't any people, there's nothing for the infected to eat! You need to calm down and stop borrowing trouble.

For once, Joel actually didn't seem too worried. She wouldn't call him relaxed, exactly. Even when he was asleep Ellie didn't feel like she'd ever really seen him drop his guard. There was something easier in the way he moved, though, like he wasn't a nail bomb constantly set to go off.

Maybe this was what he was like before, she realized. When there wasn't a threat coming from every corner.

This house turned out to be a gold mine, too: four cans of food, a bunch of clean bandages, and some energy bars, which Ellie had only seen a couple times in her life. Joel tucked those away like they were made of pure gold, and the look on his face told her it was the most valuable find of the day.

The best part was, unlike all its neighbors they'd hit so far, this house had a basement.

"I bet there's a motherload down there!" crowed Ellie, starting down the long, narrow steps into pitch darkness.

Joel put a hand out to stop her, and shook his head.

"You stay up here," he told her, "keep an eye out so nothin' can come behind us and trap us down there. If you see anything, you holler to me."

"Sure. If I see any suspicious-looking clouds roll by, you'll be the first to hear about it."

"Don't take your eyes off that front door. I mean it."

"Okay, yes! I got it. Sheesh."

"Alright. Good."

With a nod, he disappeared down the staircase. The house suddenly seemed a lot bigger, and a lot emptier. The silence loomed up around her until she started imagining noises, little creaks and groans of floorboards.

And then there was an unmistakable sound she knew didn't come from her imagination. It was the screech of a clicker, followed by a gunshot. And it was coming from under the house.

"Oh fuck!" she shouted, fumbling her own gun out and sprinting toward the basement door.

The thought flashed briefly across her mind that Joel was going to be pissed she hadn't stayed put like he told her, but it was quickly dashed aside by the fact that he obviously needed her down there. Even if a bunch of infected showed up and butt-rushed them at the exit, there was no way she was leaving him to tangle with the thing by himself.

The sounds of a struggle were growing louder every second, and Ellie's heart thudded double-time as she realized it wasn't just one clicker.

She scrabbled for her light in the darkness. As soon as it came on, she wished she hadn't.

There was a flailing, screeching mass of five or six infected all crowded at the end of the room, writhing like a ball of worms, their sickly flesh-colored growths glistening in the glow of the flashlight.

They were gathered around something, Ellie realized – Joel. She could hear him grunting with effort, swinging a board at them, but he didn't stand a chance that way. One of them was going to take a chunk out of him, if they hadn't already.

Oh fuck, she thought, Sam's twitching, fungus-riddled corpse coming suddenly to mind with a sickening lurch of her stomach, don't be bitten. Don't be bitten. Please don't –

Before she knew it, she was shouting,

"Hey, you motherfuckers! Over here! Come and fucking get it!"

One or two of the clickers looked up, screamed, and spun toward her, their arms out and seeking. But her distraction wasn't enough. The others still had Joel on the ground, and Ellie could feel panic rising in her throat.

She fired at the closest clicker. The shot winged it, and she heard the bullet ricochet off something. The second one wrapped its vice-like fingers around her arm and she barely had time to grab a shiv with shaking hands and stab it in the throat.

"Joel!" she screamed as it went down, blind panic making her struggle toward him, slashing and hacking at the clickers still between her and him.

One of them exploded into a spray of gore as Joel managed to get off a shot from his own gun, and Ellie shoved its corpse away from her, still swinging her blade wildly. The other two went down, though whether she got them or Joel did, she could barely make out.

Nothing made any sense; Joel was on the ground and there was blood all over him and no no no no oh fuck NO –

"Get up," she heard herself urging him, voice high and thin. It sounded a million miles away and like it was coming from someone else. "Get up, Joel, come on, please! You gotta move your ass!"

"I'm fine," he answered gruffly. "Come on, we're gettin' out of here."

Getting to his feet seemed to take Joel a lifetime, as Ellie's stomach wrung itself into knots and her blood rushed in her ears. There was so much blood on him. Surrounded by clickers like that, there's no way he wasn't bitten. What do I do? What the fuck do I do?

"Let me look," she said, reaching for his arm and the spot on his chest that was soaked red. "Fucking let me see, Joel!"

Her hands shook violently, and she realized she was grabbing at his shirt, her fingers fisted in the sticky plaid.

"Ellie!" Joel's voice was like a thunderclap. He pushed her off roughly. "There's no time for that. We need to leave, you understand?"

She didn't remember her response. But her body seemed to move of its own accord, following Joel's instructions mechanically, as though that were the only natural thing to do.

They ran at full tilt, past rows of houses and street signs, until everything thinned out into tall grass and livestock fences. Finally, once the town was a good half-mile behind them, Joel stopped and bent double, breathing hard with his hands braced on his knees. Ellie stopped too. For a minute, their quick, harsh breaths were the only sound.

"Shit," Joel muttered. "Somebody must've been using that place to hole up in, and the lot of 'em got infected. That's why there was so much stuff there."

Ellie stared at him in disbelief. How could he even waste time thinking about that? They had a way more pressing problem!

"Let me see where they got you," she said, her voice way more steady than she felt.

"What – ? Ellie, I said I'm fine. I ain't bit."

"Sam said that too! He said he was okay, and then he turned."

Tears pricked at Ellie's eyes, and she balled her hands into fists, looking up at Joel challengingly.

Comprehension dawned on the man's face, and slowly, he undid the first two buttons of his shirt. Underneath, his chest was smeared and matted with blood, but clean of bite marks. Ellie thought her legs might buckle from relief.

Joel gestured to the blood. "There's a lot of it, but it ain't mine. Alright?"

"Y– yeah."

"We good?"

He looked like he wanted so badly for the answer to be yes that Ellie nodded, even though she didn't feel 'good'. She felt small, and scared, even worse than when they'd seen that first clicker, what felt like ages ago.

She'd managed not to think about Sam, for the most part, after they left the radio tower behind.

It was how you got on: by shoving things down, and making a fresh start. She could deal with it, then, even though it was awful, because they'd barely known Sam and Henry. She'd been doing alright. People died in Ellie's world all the time, and getting used to that taught her to keep the grief at bay. Made it manageable. Joel helped, too, just by being around, solid and constant in his surly quietness like a law of nature.

But the abrupt reminder that the same thing could happen to him just as easily made the full weight of what had happened hit her again like a freight truck. The image of Sam's small, still body under a stained blanket filled her limbs with a kind of leaden numbness. And slowly, Sam's body became Joel's, riddled over with fungus.

What happens if you do get bit? Ellie wanted to ask. I can't pull the trigger on you, Joel. I can't fucking do it.

Instead, she swallowed the dread that followed that thought and hugged her arms around herself.

"Let's just go."

For a second, Joel hesitated. Ellie silently pleaded for him to let it go at that.

He must have worked out that she didn't want to talk, because he made a sympathetic face, but turned away without a word, and started off for the tree line.

She followed him, trying not to let her thoughts stray onto Sam or Henry or that close fucking call down in the basement, and how shitty it all made her feel. But it was like someone had hollowed her out with a spoon and replaced her insides with ice. Every step she took got heavier, until she was dragging her feet over sticks and rocks and underbrush.

In her head, Ellie tried to go over some of the puns from her joke book, but as awful and cheesy as they all were, none of it made her want to laugh. No matter how she tried, she couldn't seem to shake free of the feeling.

This sucks, she told Joel's silent back. This really fucking sucks.

o

It was hard to say when, but Joel noticed.

He stopped telling her to keep up as often and slowed down for her instead. There wasn't much else to do – the girl seemed to travel at a set pace, and trying to get her to move faster only got a nod or a shrug. For all she talked big about the things she'd seen, her tough kid act was starting to wear thin in places, and it woke something in Joel that had been dead a long time.

The worst thing he could do was to handle her with kid-gloves, that much was obvious. But he couldn't put the same force behind his usual roughness. She looked so miserable that it cut to the bone. There was something unnerving about seeing the usually energetic girl like that, and it cut him to the bone.

It made him want to reach out to her, and resisting that impulse took every year of hardened indifference Joel had lived through.

Around mid-afternoon they reached a stream, shallow enough for Ellie to cross without help. She sloshed through it with clumsy feet, and Joel glanced back to see her trudging up the bank with her head down. He sighed.

"Come on, hurry up now. There's an old ranger station I want to get to by sunset, and we ain't makin' very good time."

"I'll walk faster," she promised without enthusiasm.

For a moment he just stood there looking her over, trying to figure out what he was going to do with her. He didn't have the energy for this shit. His bones ached after the long day of walking and running for their lives, and he wouldn't even know where to start with cheering an upset teenager up. She needed a bigger distraction than he was in a position to provide.

Then an idea struck him, and a slow, crooked half-smile started to curl at one side of his mouth.

"You know what? C'mere. I want to show you somethin'."

That seemed to pique her curiosity a little. Usually when they were on the move, Joel didn't take any breaks, unless she had to piss really bad and got loud about it. It was obvious she wasn't expecting the reprieve.

"Look here." He crouched down, pointing at the muddy dirt by the stream. "See that?"

Ellie squinted.

"What are they?"

"Deer tracks," he replied. "Somebody's been usin' this spot as a waterin' hole. Looks like they're pretty fresh, too – might have taken off when it heard us coming."

"Oh. Neat."

Rising to his feet with a little grunt, Joel brushed his hands off. "Alright, we're havin' a change of plans. I'm gonna teach you how to hunt."

Ellie raised her eyebrows.

"What about the ranger station?" she asked skeptically.

"Oh, I reckon it'll still be there tomorrow."

The girl glanced around, looking a little thrown.

"Seriously?"

Joel spread his hands in a gesture of 'search me', as if to show he wasn't hiding any tricks up his sleeves. "Uh-huh. Figured after that run-in back there, neither of us is in too much of a hurry to have to head back into the city next time we're running low on food."

"Yeah, tell me about it," she muttered.

"'Course, it's been a while since I hunted anything 'cept ration cards, but I think I've still got the edge."

There was a sort of bitter note to the subdued humor in Joel's voice, thinking about the people attached to those cards. If anyone had told him back in his days as a hunter that he'd be here ten years later, all ties severed and helping some strange kid get across the country – cheering her up, for Christ's sake – he'd have sneered at the idea. But it felt natural, in a way killing tourists to survive never had.

This, for the first time in a long time, felt right.

Ellie crossed her arms, making an unconvinced face as though she didn't believe he could ever have had an edge.

"If food was so easy to get back in your day, how come you had to hunt?"

"We didn't have to," replied Joel, who was looking around the clearing, probably to see if there were more tracks. "It was mostly for fun."

"Weird idea of fun."

"Yeah, I guess it was."

"But, I mean, if it keeps us from having to fight a bunch of infected over a couple cans of creamed corn, I'm all for it," she added. It was all the agreement Joel needed.

"Alright, come on over here, then."

When Ellie followed the direction, he pointed to a thicket of bushes by their knees. Some of the twigs had been snapped and flattened down. It was a good place to start, teaching her tracking – she'd have to concentrate, and that would take her mind off of whatever was bothering her more efficiently than anything else.

"Now, you're not just looking for tracks," he explained, putting a hand on the girl's shoulder and showing her where to look. "Right here – you can see where our deer did some damage bolting out of here. We follow that trail, and we'll find him. Bet he didn't go too far."

o

On the other side of a stand of trees, there was another patch of trampled grass. With Joel in tow, hanging back to let her get the hang of it, Ellie looked around, trying to see where the trail went. It looked like it might end there, and she sighed in frustration.

Then, a few feet ahead, she spotted a branch that had been snapped off.

"Oh shit!" she breathed. "Joel, over here! I think he went this way."

"Shh, Ellie, not so loud," he cautioned, moving her aside to inspect the branch. "We don't want to spook him, alright?"

"Oh, yeah." Ellie ducked her head sheepishly. "Guess I'm not exactly a natural at this."

Joel tapped her shoulder, urging her through the gap between the trees. "Go on, now, let's just keep it down."

She crept forward a little hesitantly, like the deer might be right on the other side of the next thicket of trees. They were spread out enough to see a ways, but that didn't make her feel any less conspicuous as leaves crunched and twigs snapped under her heel. Crap, I'm leaving a trail of my own, she thought. Not like an animal would be tracking them – that was only something they had to worry about with other people around.

Amazingly, the little clues – footprints here, fur snagged on a branch there – didn't come to any dead ends, and with Joel's occasional help, Ellie was able to follow them for a good half-mile.

There was a kind of intensity to sneaking through the forest, keeping her breathing quiet and staying on the lookout for any sign of their prey. It was totally different from the tension of sneaking through a city or a clicker-infested basement. This time, she was trying not to be heard by something that wasn't going to kill her, for once.

In a way, it was kind of fun.

By the time they caught up with the deer, Ellie had become completely absorbed in concentrating on the trail. The animal was just up ahead, a smudge of solid tan that she barely saw through the leaves and branches between them.

"There!" she whispered to Joel.

He just raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment, one finger up to his lips. Slowly, he made his way over until he was crouched right behind her, looking over the top of her head. When he spoke, his voice was so low and close to her ear that it tickled.

"Be real still. We don't want to spook him."

Ellie nodded. A shiver ran down her spine. Her whole body was buzzing with excitement, a pleasant sort of tension from the hunt, but part of it was the closeness of Joel's body behind her. She could feel the heat of him against her back, and his breath in her ear made something catch tight in her chest. Shit, I'm way too nervous to get off a good shot, she berated herself.

Before she could say anything, it was like Joel read her mind.

"Here, lemme see that bow of yours," he whispered, and his deep voice rumbled straight to the pit of her stomach.

A while ago, after they picked up the rifle, she'd ended up carrying the bow so Joel had more room on his own back. It had gotten to be a comfortable weight against her shoulder. Now, as he slid it free, Ellie felt a little bit off-balance without it there – almost naked.

Joel leaned in to whisper to her again, and gooseflesh went up all over her arms.

"You know how to use a bow and arrow, 's that right?"

Not daring to speak, Ellie just nodded. Her heart was racing.

"Be careful now. You only get one shot, because the arrow'll spook him if you miss. Just…take a nice, deep breath, and try to loosen up."

Just like when he'd taught her to hold the rifle, he put a hand out to help keep her steady, this time on the small of her back. It helped with balance, given the way she was crouched. But something about it made Ellie's nerves light up worse than they already were.

She exhaled shallowly.

"…Okay."

Loosening up turned out to be easier said than done. All her nerves were singing with tension, and she wished Joel wasn't pressed so close behind her. It left something warm burning under her ribcage, a distraction she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she ended up holding her breath instead of taking it in slow like he'd said.

She pulled back the way she'd been taught, until she could feel the arrow trembling against her fingers. This bow was bigger than the one she'd used before, and bending it was way harder than it looked. There was no way her arrow was going to fly straight.

At least I'm not trying to hit a moving target, she thought, and loosed the shot.

It whistled through the trees, straight over the back of the deer, who raised his head in alarm and glanced around before sprinting off into the cover of the forest.

"Aw, fuck! He got away."

Ellie sprang up.

Joel looked like he was just on the edge of laughing, more at her reaction than at her failure, which soothed the burn a little. "He sure did."

"Well, are we gonna chase him?" she asked impatiently, slipping the bow onto her back and taking a step in the direction their prey had gone.

"That's probably alright. I'm not sure we'd know what to do with a buck that big if we got 'im."

He was right. For one thing, they had nowhere to store the meat, even if they could find a way to smoke it, which they didn't have time for. Most of it would have gone to waste. Joel had to have known that, so why did he even bother taking the time to show her how to hunt it in the first place?

Realization hit her like a stone.

Suddenly, Ellie felt like an idiot. The whole hunting idea had been to get her out of her funk. It had totally worked, too, and an immense gratitude welled up inside her.

For the first time since Pittsburgh, she didn't want to curl up and hide when she thought of the road ahead – or the road behind. The rolling, bright excitement of the hunt was still thrumming through her veins, and she felt good. Like herself again.

It had cost them a half a day of travel, and he'd done it for her.

Holy shit. Thanks, Joel.

"Yeah, I guess it's okay," she said, turning back to him with a tiny smile. "Next time, right? I seriously need to brush up on that bow if I ever want to catch anything, though."

Satisfaction shone in the man's eyes, even though he was quick to bury it under a gruff nod. He scratched his beard and then clapped a hand on her shoulder. It was brief, but the contact made Ellie feel about a thousand feet tall.

Joel looked thoughtful. After a moment, he spoke up.

"You know, you don't have to be able to shoot to hunt. How 'bout I teach you how to make a snare?"

o

They set three traps, made from some of the wire in Joel's pack. He showed her how to tie the snare off, and how to curve a branch to make a trigger.

"The problem with snares," he explained as they crouched in the bushes a couple hundred yards away from the last one, "is it can take all day to catch somethin'. You gotta remember where you set it, and you gotta come back along and check it every once in a while, if you don't want somebody else gettin' your kill."

Ellie nodded intently. She was more interested in hearing Joel talk than in learning about snares, but she paid attention all the same.

Something about his voice was soothing as hell. Maybe it was the rise and fall of his Southern inflection, or the way it rumbled up from deep in his chest, but she felt weirdly at home listening to it. Lots of guys back in the Zone had the same accent, but the way they pinched everything out through their noses, Ellie couldn't imagine it having this effect. It had never seemed particularly special before.

Joel's voice, though, tripped some switch inside her that made her want to listen for hours.

"Ellie? You payin' attention?"

"Uh – yeah!" The tips of her ears turned hot. "Check the traps, don't let assholes steal your shit, takes for-fucking-ever, yada yada."

He folded his arms.

"Actually, I was just saying we need to start thinkin' about making camp soon."

Ellie grinned sheepishly. "Oh, yeah, that."

"Let's check our snares over, and see if we can't find some shelter." He stepped out of the bushes, and she followed, wondering what kind of 'shelter' they were going to find out in the middle of the woods.

To her disappointment, the first two traps were empty. Joel spooled the wire and put it back in his pack. He didn't seem surprised by their lack of success. Still, after fucking up with the deer, Ellie really hoped they'd be able to at least catch something.

When she saw the last trap, she actually punched the air and shouted in victory. Dangling from the wire was a plump grey squirrel, still kicking and wriggling.

"Oh fuck yes!" she crowed, running over to pull it down.

Its teeth snapped at the sensitive skin between her thumb and forefinger. Ellie swore loudly and sprang back, shaking her injured hand.

"Careful," Joel said, stepping up and wringing the squirrel's neck in one swift, efficient motion. "You don't want a case of goddamn rabies."

She whistled. "Jeez, that was brutal."

Ignoring the comment, Joel unhooked the snare and looped it behind the animal's limp head so he could hang it from his pack. Ellie watched it bounce slightly with each step he took. She'd seen that same efficiency break human necks – but those people had been trying to kill them.

And that squirrel is going to feed us, she reminded herself.

They hiked through the woods a ways, the sun slowly setting lower and lower behind them. She honestly had no idea what Joel was looking for, but she figured he'd stop when they found it.

Sure enough, as they came to the bottom of a rock face, he slowed and craned his neck back, squinting up at something Ellie couldn't see. It was steep, but not tall, with deep grooves in the smooth grey stone. Nothing about it seemed especially out of the ordinary.

Joel, though, seemed to feel differently.

"Looks like this is us for the night," he announced.

"What? I don't see anything. It's a bunch of rocks."

Joel pointed. "Up there – there's a cave we can hole up in. Best shelter we're gonna find. Doesn't look like too bad of a climb, either."

She laughed and stared at him, halfway between amusement and disbelief. "You wanna – you wanna scale that thing? That's like a straight up cliff. No way I can climb that, and no offense, but I doubt your old bones can handle it either."

"Trust me," he replied with a sideways look, "these 'old bones' can manage just fine."

"Well, what about me?"

"You go on up first. I'll be right behind you."

He gestured for her to get a start. Ellie glanced incredulously at the crumbling cliff, then back at Joel, who raised eyebrows impatiently. With a sigh, she stepped up toe-to-toe with the rocks, and began to look for a handhold.

Once she found one, it was surprisingly easy going. A few feet off the ground, though, she broke her own rule and glanced back down. The drop threatened to make her dizzy until she noticed Joel was just a couple of steps behind.

"Oh man," she mumbled, turning her face back to the smooth stone in front of her.

Her next step was more confident, though. It was only a few more feet to the top – she could make it. Joel was behind her. She'd be fine.

Ellie's foot made contact with a groove in the stone. It seemed to hold for a second, until she put her full weight on it. Then, with a sickening lurch, she found herself falling through empty space. Terror snatched the air out of her lungs, and she let out a breathless scream as her back collided with something hard.

"Whoa, easy now," grunted Joel's voice in her ear, sounding almost as shaken by Ellie's sudden slip as she felt. "I gotcha. I gotcha."

They stayed still like that for a few moments, Joel with one hand fitted firmly into the curve of Ellie's waist and the other clinging to his own handhold in the rock face, until her heartbeat stopped hammering and climbed back down out of her throat, and she could breathe again.

As she calmed down, the sensation of the hard, solid wall of Joel's body against her back came into sharp focus. Just like in the bushes earlier, stalking the deer, something hot settled in the pit of Ellie's stomach, and she felt her cheeks burn.

She didn't want to move, she realized, and not just because she was afraid of falling again.

"You okay?" Joel's breath curled hot across her ear, and his whiskers tickled her cheek. Ellie squeezed her eyes shut, praying he couldn't feel the way she trembled against him.

"I'm – I'm good," she stammered, pulling away with electric quickness to press herself back against the stone.

"Alright. Let's keep moving, then."

From behind, Joel gave her a little push to get her going again. She was careful to test every step after that before putting her weight on it, but there weren't any more loose rocks to stumble on. It was just as well, with her knees still weak and her legs shaky, a combination of leftover nerves and the warm feeling that was still tying knots in her gut.

Ellie scrambled up over the edge of the cliff and turned back to help Joel after her, but he was already heaving himself up. The muscles in his arms strained with effort, and she couldn't help staring. He'd lifted plenty of things, her included. Had that been so…hot before? She couldn't remember noticing.

But it was definitely really fucking hot now.

Stop it, she told herself furiously. Don't think about that. Just – stop. Spinning on her heel, the girl stalked away, trying not to glance back.

"Ellie!"

Joel's exasperated tone brought her up short, embarrassed by her own overreaction.

When she turned around, he was looking at her with a curious expression. "Cave's over here."

"Uh, right! I knew that."

Hoping she was making something even close to a normal expression, Ellie adjusted her pack, gave Joel a thumbs-up, and followed him to the low, dark entrance he pointed out, farther along the ridge.

o

Things returned a little more to normal after they set up camp.

Joel had built a tiny fire just outside the mouth of the cave, and they roasted the squirrel over it on a makeshift spit. With the distraction of food and a conversation that didn't revolve around getting from point A to point B, Ellie almost forgot about the feeling she'd had earlier. The fire was warm, and Joel's deep chuckle filled her like hot tea on a winter day back at the boarding school.

"No shit!" she insisted seriously, laughing hard at the story she'd just told. "They caught me putting pigeons in the officers' soup when I was on mess duty, so they confiscated our BB gun and put me on latrines for like a moth. I guess that was the last straw, because I got transferred right after that."

"I can see why the Fireflies recruited you," said Joel.

"Hey, sabotage isn't my only skill. I could hit a bird in the eye with that BB gun from like fifty feet away."

"Yeah, I bet you could."

Joel fell silent after that – probably thinking about how he didn't like Ellie shooting stuff. Looking for a way to change the topic, she took a giant bite out of her squirrel leg.

"Fuck me, this is a million times better than beans," she moaned.

"If you think that's good, you should've tasted real Texas barbecue." There was real regret in Joel's voice, and the look on his face said he was far away, thinking about another time. "I swear, Ellie, you never tasted anything like it. It's a goddamn shame, is what it is."

Ellie watched him, bathed golden in the firelight, his eyes shut and head tilted back in rapture over some remembered taste. That uneasy heat stirred in her stomach again. Handsome, she realized. He looks handsome.

Suddenly uncomfortable, she shifted around, chewing another mouthful of squirrel. A diversion – she needed a diversion, and fast.

"Maybe you could teach me how to make it," she tried lamely.

"Naw, it's complicated. You need a rub, and a good sauce. I could never barbecue worth a damn anyway. More of a TV dinner guy."

"Well, I think you're an okay cook. I mean, we'll see if I'm puking my guts up tomorrow, but for now you get the Ellie Williams Seal of Approval."

Joel snorted. "It's cooked. You'll be fine."

Ellie took a sip off the canteen of water they were sharing, hoping it would settle her nervous stomach.

No matter what, her brain kept circling back around to the feeling of being pressed up against him, his arms the only thing keeping her from a deadly fall. Think about getting food poisoning instead. Think about a clicker biting your head off! Just think about anything but fucking that! she admonished herself furiously.

Fortunately, the meal was pretty much over. Joel had a habit of either going to bed or taking up a restless watch right after they finished eating, and that was true tonight, too. He stood up and stretched. Ellie glanced away.

"Alright," said Joel, his thick drawl shot through with a yawn, "let's get this fire put out and turn in for the night."

Oh, no.

Ellie hadn't even thought about it, between being flustered over the sudden realization of her very physical attraction to the older man and trying not to be flustered, but they'd been sleeping close for warmth ever since it started turning colder.

Suddenly, going to bed wasn't a line of retreat. It was a fucking nightmare. Spending eight hours pressed up against Joel, soaking up his body heat, sounded like torture.

Just don't be a fucking weirdo about it and it'll be fine! she tried to tell herself, but as they kicked dirt over the fire and spread out their packs side-by-side to use as pillows, all she could feel was the urge to freak out.

Things didn't have to get weird. Maybe he was hot, okay, yeah. So what? She was just acknowledging an objective fact. It didn't mean anything.

Ellie kept repeating that to herself as she settled in beside Joel. The steady heat of his back should have been a comfort, but instead it sunk straight to the pit of her stomach and then, to her horror, between her legs. Mortified, she squirmed under the thin blanket that covered them both and pressed her thighs together tight, trying to kill the feeling. Moving away wasn't an option, because she'd fucking freeze. But if she stayed there, it was only going to get worse.

What do I do? Just ignore it? Slowly but surely, the heat was becoming an ache, and the ache was becoming unbearable.

This wasn't like back in the dormitories, though. Joel was right fucking next to her and there was no way she could get off without waking him up. Plus, that felt like crossing a serious line.

On the other hand, if she didn't take care of this, she definitely wouldn't be getting any sleep.

As if to drive that point home, another throbbing wave of frustration swept over her, and Ellie squeezed her eyes shut, like that would turn everything below her neck off. Next to her, Joel shifted and groaned in his sleep, and she stiffened instantly. It was just one of his bad dreams. She knew that – he had them almost every night. But the sound went through her like electricity, putting every hair on her body on end.

On the off chance that he was actually awake, not dreaming, she laid stock-still until she heard his breathing even out again into a telltale rhythmic rise and fall. Even then, Ellie waited a few minutes, not daring to move.

But slowly, her need began to win out, and her fingers crept down her stomach toward the waistband of her jeans.

Another restless grunt from Joel scared her nearly out of her skin. Heart hammering, she froze for a second, before sliding tentative fingers into her underwear. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the dark shape of Joel's body, faintly outlined by moonlight. He didn't so much as twitch.

That made her bolder, and she felt around until her fingertips grazed the spot she was looking for. She bit her lip to keep quiet, and curled her fingers into herself.

It felt like forever since she'd done this, and the feeling built on her fast, like a river rushing toward the dam. Ellie swallowed a breathy sigh, determined to stay completely silent. Waves of sharp pleasure washed over her, making her squirm and push up against her own hand.

But no matter what she did, she couldn't push herself over that edge. She didn't dare move too much and risk waking Joel up, but her slow, careful rhythm wasn't even close to enough.

And then it happened.

Out of nowhere, Ellie realized she'd started imagining that her fingers were broad, rough-calloused. Joel's fingers. The same ones that had gripped her arm hard to pull her up when she nearly fell into a ravine a few days back, and that had pressed into her hip when he caught her fall earlier on the cliff.

What would that feel like, she wondered? How different would everything be if it were Joel with his hand shoved into her jeans, his firm chest against her back? A gasp slipped from her lips as she imagined him rocking into her from behind.

This is so fucked up.

The thought came on as suddenly as her arousal had, and it hit her just as hard.

Just like that, she knew she wasn't going to get anywhere no matter what she did, but she kept trying for a few minutes anyway. It was no good. Anytime she started to get really turned on again, she found herself thinking of Joel, and then guilt hit her like a brick wall, knocking all the wind out of her sails.

"Ughhh!"

Finally, she gave a muffled groan of frustrated disgust, and gave up.

With a resentful glare at the cave ceiling, Ellie rolled onto her side, facing away from Joel. At least the whole ordeal hadn't seemed to wake him up, she thought miserably. One of them was going to get some sleep tonight, at any rate.

Feeling absolutely crummy, she closed her eyes and made a futile effort to fall asleep.