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The first thing she notices after being clocked in the jaw is big brown eyes, blinking at her with the faintest hint of worry.
She kicks out, furious that she’s been caught off guard. Her hands frantically pat around her surroundings to find her Walkman, and to her chagrin there’s nothing but cold floor and sweaty smears of blood. She hopes it isn’t hers.
“Hey, hey - new kid, it’s okay. Take some deep breaths.”
Ellie growls and makes a desperate swing from the ground, which the older girl intercepts with poorly hidden amusement. She grabs her wrists and pins them gently to the floor.
“Seriously, calm down. The captain is coming and we’re trying to make a fucking case for why you decked Carol in the face.”
Ellie blinks up at her. The other girl’s brows are furrowed, brown cheeks slightly pinked by the cold. A thick twist of braids falls over her shoulder. Something deep in her spine whispers danger.
“Yeah, okay,” she mutters. “Maybe you can tell them she stole my fuckin Walkman.”
The other girl sits back on her haunches. Her piercing gaze makes Ellie shift uncomfortably. She feels raw and exposed, and just wants to curl up into her shitty twin bed and listen to music and daydream about blood running down Carol’s smug face.
“Sure, that works. It works, doesn’t it?” This she barks to the two girls standing behind her, who both shift uncomfortably.
“Riley, can’t we just leave?” Pleads one of them, a mousy slip of a girl whose eyes have been darting around the room since Ellie’s been conscious enough to notice. The girl - Riley - sneers over at her and then her unnervingly clear brown eyes meet Ellie’s.
“Can’t leave this one to fend for herself, can we?” And Ellie forces herself to maintain her gaze, green eyes meeting brown ones, and something shifts, clicks, changes; and it feels risky, or like something worse, something like getting invested in another person, and Ellie shoves it down, down, down, into the abyss where things like giving a shit went.
She sticks her hand out. “My name’s Ellie.”
Riley smirks, and warm dry fingers clasp hers. “Riley.”
***
Later that day Ellie is hunkered down in her dorm, which is blessedly single, likely due to her track record of getting into fights with whomever they try to room her with. She’s hungry and frustrated and Captain Kwong gave her a bullshit lecture per usual. She wants nothing more than peace and quiet. Predictably, she gets neither.
Rapid knocking interrupts her from her zoned out stupor. She growls at the intruder to leave her the fuck alone, but the banging continues. She gets up, throws the door open, and says what, only to lay her eyes on -
Riley. She’d throw a punch at her too, except her hand is outstretched and in it is -
“My Walkman!” Ellie exclaims, and makes grabby hands to get to her beloved device.
Riley relinquishes it and rolls her eyes, shouldering past Ellie to flop onto her back over her duvet.
“Yeah, you’re welcome. Kwong couldn’t find it on Carol but he assumed she just ditched it somewhere. You’ve got shit music taste by the way.”
Ellie can’t even bring it in herself to care. She slips the headphones over her ears eagerly and tests the tape inside. The familiar strum of guitar is like a balm upon her ears and she sighs.
“I guess you suck less than I thought.”
Riley props herself up on her elbows. “Suck? I rescued your ass!”
“I had it handled!”
“Your lip begs to differ.”
With her words the sting of her split lip returns and she runs her tongue along the break, tasting metal and salt. She shrugs, self-conscious all of a sudden.
She wants to sit, but the idea of being on the bed with the other girl sprawled over it is unquestionably terrifying. Instead she plops down on the ratty little carpet next to the bed and looks up to meet Riley’s gaze, her brow scrunched.
“What’s your deal anyway?”
Ellie shrugs. “Orphan.”
Riley nods sagely, as if that answers every question she could possibly have about her background. “Me too. Well, I am now. I didn’t used to be.”
Ellie’s stomach twinges. “I’ve always been one.”
The older girl studies her, and the twinge grows into an uncomfortable fluttering. She wants to run away but desperately doesn’t want Riley to leave. Having her there is like picking a scab: it feels good even if it makes you hurt worse when it’s over and done with.
“We should be friends, I think.”
Ellie crosses her arm and raises an eyebrow, doing her best impression of bravado that a tween can muster.
“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”
Riley’s eyes crinkle in the corners, her smile beatific. “I think you’re funny, new kid. And seems like you could use someone who sticks around.”
The flutter grows until it’s a swarm, rattling around her insides, a warning call - but she’s desperate for something that stays, even if the phantom pain of loss starts to calcify around the edges of her heart. Doesn’t she deserve a friend, too, tiding her over until the inevitable creep of fungus drawing her back into the ecosystem of the apocalypse?
On her way out, returning to her room, Riley’s calloused knuckles brush against the hairs on her arm. She shivers and lays in bed, the crackly voice of Dave Gahan swarming her head until the wave of sleep, blessedly, takes over.
***
Being friends with Riley, Ellie decides, is what being on a rollercoaster must be like. (She’s always wanted to try one.) She’s loud, boisterous, and half of the girls respect her quietly and the other half rally behind the Carols and Bethanys and do their best to torment her and anyone who falls in her shadow, which now includes Ellie. She doesn’t mind, and honestly prefers it: it’s more fun to get the shit kicked out of you if your friend is grunting in pain nearby. And easier to rip chunks of silky hair out of Bethany’s stupid skull when Riley’s got her pinned down by the wrists. Girlhood in the QZ resembles dogs released out of their cages after being starved and trapped for days on end - there’s no real reason to fight other than feeling something, even if it hurts, even if it leaves your teeth bloody and aching.
That and the only way out of drinking yourself to death after graduating is getting a halfway decent placement, and FEDRA watches silently, eagle eyes separating the strong, the brutal, from the weak. More than that, they look out for the ones defiant enough to keep getting up, keep fighting the power. They’re the ones that need squashing.
Ellie doesn’t want to die, not really. But now that she has Riley, she viciously wants to live.
The other girl is several inches taller than her, further along in her awkward ascension to womanhood. She’s good at sneaking out of the dorms, even if she refuses to let Ellie come half the time, citing her age and boasting of the dangers she’s overcome on the rooftops and in the sewers of Boston. But it’s hard to protest when she always brings her back some kind of trinket: Savage Starlight comics, a charcoal pencil and scraps of paper, a busted up map of some old zoo in New York before the outbreak. In weeks, Ellie’s world has gone from small to bursting at the seams and it feels horrible, it feels like eating a slice of orange for the first time, it feels sticky and hot and like she’ll die if it’s ever taken away.
In two more weeks, Riley’s roommate (a heavily scarred girl named Kayla with a perpetual grimace ripped into her mouth) graduates and gets her assignment. Riley moves into her room the next day. Ellie doesn’t even mind being her shadow, names shifting from new kid to Riley’s little sidekick (or bitch, if you asked Bethany). She feels, tentatively, for the first time in her short miserable life, like she belongs.
***
She realizes she’s different than the other girls slowly, painfully, and then all at once.
The boys train in a different academy. FEDRA can’t afford an unpredictable number of mouths to feed or losing their soldiers to teen pregnancies, and things like birth control or condoms were precious currency on the black market. Nonetheless, when their training regimens would bring them glimpses of the other half of the teenagers in the QZ, the girls would titter and whisper, blushing cheeks getting smacked redder by the sour Captain Billings, aged face pinched with rage. Riley always rolls her eyes and Ellie -
She feels nothing at all.
But her skin erupts in goosebumps when Riley huffs a laugh near her neck. Her face grows hot and embarrassed in the showers after drills, eyes trained determinedly forward on the handle of the hot water until it runs cold and the other girls are long dressed. Despite being short and scrawny, she feels altogether too big for her skin when Riley knocks her boots against hers, the warmth of her thigh pressed along hers on the cafeteria benches. She swoons over the exploits of Dr. Daniela Star and admires the badassery of Mileena from Mortal Kombat. So yeah. Ellie knows there’s something different about her.
She knows the bad words for it, the ones the popular girls spit at her under their breath when Riley can’t hear. And she knows something bigger and worse, because she’s not stupid, and she knows it’s not entirely normal to want to lace your fingers together with your best friend and listen to the gentle thud of her heartbeat.
So she scuffs her toes and keeps her eyes glued to the ground, keeps her arms tight to the side so they don’t brush the warmth of Riley’s skin, always so alive and hot to the touch; she lets her freckles obscure her blushing and her foul mouth obscure the softness rotting away in her throat.
The days are short, never ending, hopeless; but her love feels like it stretches to the horizon, like there’s not enough space for it to ever find its edges. Love is too long, and the months tick away until Riley’s 17th is closer than her 16th.
Ellie listens to Etta James in the quiet, Riley’s breaths regular and reassuring from across the room, and aches.
Riley leaves a few weeks later, and the calcified cage around her heart cracks and she screams and screams and screams but no words come out.
***
When Riley’s gone, Ellie can’t seem to stop remembering.
She started drawing early. Even before coming to the FEDRA military school she would scratch designs into anything with anything: rough sketches of what she imagined her mother to look like, the rats she used to practice shooting at with a BB gun, the constellations she could pick out in the sky above Boston. Riley loved her art, begged and wheedled to be allowed to see her sketches. She used to flop across Ellie’s bed after rounds and loudly whisper about her drawings getting put into a museum, how in the old world hundreds of people would come visit her exhibits. She said her parents used to tell her about warm summer afternoons in the heart of downtown Atlanta before the outbreak, where families would stroll from gallery to sandwich shop to theater on monthly art walks. How there’d be sweet creamy frozen treats and hot fried meat, how people would laugh, loud and unabashed, the threat of clickers haunting only fanciful nightmares and horror movies.
When Riley leaves, Ellie scribbles over the portraits she had hastily drawn and hidden of the other girl’s eyes, dimples, full mouth; the shaky lines of all her girlish hopes and awe. She wants to die. Riley will come back.
She wants to live.
***
“Shut up!”
“No! You fucking shut up!”
Riley leans back, cackling. “You look so fucking stupid with pigtail braids.”
Ellie huffs, nervous fingers already coming to the elastic to shake out the plaits that Riley had put there.
“It was a dumb idea.”
“Hey, you’re the one who complains about your hair all the time, getting in your eyes and shit.”
“Guess I’ll have to suffer,” she mutters, cheeks burning. She scrambled to put it up in a messy thick ponytail, pushes the curly bits that fall out behind her ears. One day she’ll cut it. Something cool, like the smoky eyed, androgynous models that she’s seen on the contraband skin mags that some of the older girls smuggled in.
Maybe then Riley won’t see her like the 13 year old she rescued, and more like the 14 (going on 15!) year old she’s become. Old enough to sneak out, to confide in, to trust with her life.
She picks at her fingernails, and misses the way Riley’s eyes follow her, the twinge of worry in them. The fear that maybe the teasing had really gotten to the soft girlish quick of her, left tooth marks on her heart.
Riley’s pinkie brushes hers. “I like your hair the way it is, you know.”
They sit in companionable silence, after that, backs pressed to the wall and listening to the creaks of the cicadas outside. Summer air wafts in through the crack in the window, something sweet and right in the way it brushes against their cheeks. Tender.
Ellie hates remembering.
***
On the last night they have together, the last night Ellie has as a whole person, as a person whose lungs remember how to breathe without gasping, Ellie thinks, I love you.
The words fill up her chest like one of those hot air balloons Riley’s told her about that she doesn’t quite believe ever existed - they fill her up like hot wet air, like rock music, like the trickle of water from a forest stream in spring when the ice melts and blooms creep out of winter - her love no longer haunts her but hums along her skin, released.
She thinks, when they’re bitten, you’re the only thing worth dying for, and presses her chapped mouth to the sweaty divot of skin where Riley’s jaw meets her neck, and cries, and cries, and lets her salty tears leak down to meet the tendrils of fungus angrily festering around the drooling wounds, unable to creep into her bloodstream.
She thinks, when Riley’s eyes darken and film over, when the bits of her that made her Riley get greedily eaten up, take me with you.
But her eyes stay green, and the flash of silver is quick, and her hands aren’t even bloodied. Her fingers buried in her hair, her arms pressed against cool skin, all the touch she never had and now all she gets is a ghost.
And when a woman who calls herself Marlene comes and pries her off, who chains her hands together, and shakes her head, almost disbelieving, and remarks that she’s alive, Ellie can’t stop shaking her head.
The glowing alive part of her is gone, and yet her love still stretches up and around and over the horizon, searching for the edges.
***
fin.