The orchards gave way to open country in the space of a morning: rolling hills, rusted power-line skeletons stitched across a huge sky, prairie grass bending in a wind that never stopped.
Ethan kept them to the lee of the ridges, following dried creek beds when he could, keeping their silhouettes off the skylines. Ellie had stopped asking how he knew. She just watched where his feet went and put hers in the same places.
They crested a windswept hill at midday, and Ellie pointed at a crumbling radio tower on the next ridge over.
"Did people really talk across the whole world? Before?"
"Yeah. Satellites, radio waves. You could talk to someone on the other side of the planet like they were standing next to you."
"That's insane." She was quiet a moment, the wind pulling at her hair. "Do you miss it? The before? You remember more of it than me."
Ethan looked at the tower a long moment. "I miss knowing what came next," he said finally. "Everybody knew the shape of a day. Now every day's a guess."
Ellie nodded like that made perfect sense. "I like guessing with you better than knowing without you."
He didn't have an answer for that, so he just walked a little closer to her. "So you really liked those strategy games? Building things?"
"Systems," Ethan said. "Cities, defenses. Finding the efficient way through a problem." He nudged a stone with his boot. "Like outsmarting a Puker."
"Exactly like that," she said, and laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her — and Ethan felt something loosen in his chest, a fraction, dangerous and welcome at once.
Joel walked a few yards behind, watching Ellie's face light up, hearing that laugh. The kid drew people in without trying — drew Ellie in — and Joel's gut stayed knotted around it. Not suspicion anymore, or not only suspicion. Something older and simpler: the fear of watching someone you love stand too close to an edge.
The valley below them went still. The wind died between one breath and the next, and the grass stopped moving, and Ethan's skin prickled — not the fungal rot of infected. Something cleaner. Metallic. Human.
He lifted his head, tasting the air the way Grandpa Jack had taught him — separate the smells, name them, don't let them blur. Dust. Grass. Old concrete. And under all of it, gun oil and sweat, faint as a rumor.
Then: a glint of sun off glass, high on the left ridge.
"Down!" Ethan dropped behind a cluster of rocks, voice a raw whisper. "Cover — now!"
Joel hauled Ellie down beside him, shotgun up, eyes raking the ridge. "Snipers?"
"Two of them. High ground, watching the valley floor. They've seen us — we're in the kill zone." Ethan peered through a gap in the rocks. "There's a ravine past those dead trees. If we reach it, they lose the angle."
"That's open ground, kid," Joel hissed. "They'll cut us down."
"Not if they're looking at me." Ethan was already tightening his bootlaces, settling his pack. "Joel — your shotgun's loud. When I move, make noise at the ridge. Keep their heads down. Ellie, you stay on Joel and run for the ravine. Don't stop, don't look back."
Ellie's face went white. "You're going to draw their fire? Are you insane?"
"They're going for headshots. They'll miss." He met her eyes, then Joel's. "It's what Grandpa taught me. To be the ghost."
Another bullet cracked overhead and chewed stone. No more time.
"Now!"
Ethan burst from cover at a dead sprint — not straight, never straight, cutting left and right across the slope, using every dip and rise, his lungs already burning. The rifles cracked from the ridge. Dust fountained where he'd been half a second before. The air itself seemed to tear beside his ear, close enough to feel.
A bullet split a dead branch off a snag to his left and it spun past his shoulder. He didn't think — thinking was slow — he just let his body do what Grandpa's drills had carved into it: never the same line twice, never the high ground of a stride, make them guess and guess wrong.
Behind him Joel roared and opened up, the shotgun booming again and again at the ridge, smoke and noise rolling uphill. Ellie ran, small legs pumping, Joel's bulk between her and the ridge, not stopping, not looking back the way she'd been told — though Ethan could hear her breathing, ragged and terrified, somewhere behind the gunfire.
He was ten yards from the ravine when the bullet found him.
It was a hot punch through his thigh — through, clean through — and his leg folded under him and he went down hard into the brush at the ravine's edge, the world narrowing to the torn muscle screaming with every heartbeat.
"Ethan!" Ellie's scream tore the air.
Joel was there first, dragging him down into the ravine's cover, hands already tearing at Ethan's pant leg. The wound was a through-and-through, blood welling dark from both sides, the muscle around it torn and already swelling.
"Lucky," Joel grunted, winding a strip torn from Ethan's own shirt tight around the thigh. "No bone. But you're not walking on this, kid. Not today."
Ellie was beside them, her hands shaking, her face wet. "You idiot," she whispered. "You absolute idiot."
Ethan managed a breath that was almost a laugh. "Worked, didn't it?"
Night fell cold over the valley. They found a shallow cave, barely deep enough to lie down in, and Joel built the smallest fire he dared. He cleaned the wound with the last of their water and re-wrapped it, his big hands careful in a way that surprised even Ethan.
He'd done this before, Ethan realized — not just patching, but the particular economy of it, no wasted motion, the way you only get from doing it when it counted. Joel didn't talk while he worked. He just breathed through his nose, steady, and tied off the bandage like a promise.
Ellie sat close, her knee against his good leg. When Joel turned to feed the fire, she reached out and took Ethan's hand — her fingertips brushing his, then settling, warm and certain. It lingered a fraction longer than comfort required.
"You saved us," she whispered.
"Someone had to," he said.
Her hand stayed over his in the firelight, and neither of them moved it.