Chapter Text
Bad news travels fast—that much, Tommy knew. Especially in such a small town like Jackson is.
What he didn’t know yet was how fast they did.
Half the town had gathered around the clinic by the time he stopped Pilgrim and Goliath in front of the two-story building where Doc lived and worked at. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pinpoint amongst the crowd the faces of the two women who should be there, aware of the situation and Joel’s condition.
“Tommy! What the hell happened?” John scowled, stepping forward to hold Joel’s horse’s reins.
“Explanations later,” he scowled, throwing his leg over the horse.
He’d already tried explaining twice and it had gotten him nowhere, back at the gates, and again on his way to the clinic, so he’d just decided he wouldn’t waste his saliva anymore until Doc got to Joel. Of course, they were nervous, and they were right to be: Joel was barely conscious, badly injured, and covered in blood. Tommy couldn't get to him in time.
“Help me out,” Tommy ordered, waving at Savannah and Kristen, the two people closest to the horses, as well. The former held Pilgrim’s reins to keep him steady and the other woman tried to coax Joel to wake up.
Upon the movement and the familiar voices, Joel opened one eye, shot with blood, and mumbled something. It was no wonder. His lips and his other eye were almost stuck with dried blood. It had taken Tommy too long to take care of that damned thing, carry Joel back to Pilgrim, and ride back to town.
“What was that?” Savannah asked.
“Not sure,” said Kristen.
The man tried talking again, but he only let out a few vowels, unintelligible to the three people tending to Joel and helping him down his horse. Tommy couldn’t provide any answers: Doc had finally gotten out of the clinic, as shocked and worried as everyone else was.
“What the hell?” he scowled, looking at Tommy—his bloody shirt indicated he had been with Joel.
The physician did need some answers and so Tommy sighed, scratching the back of his head.
“Bloater attack,” he said, a simple enough and yet terrifying explanation to give. He’d tried to keep his voice down but the words still traveled amongst the townsfolk. Murmurs and frightened whispers raised, some parents even tried getting their children away, as if the simple word could bring them nightmares.
It was essential that they checked with the group patrols as soon as they got back. They needed to know if there was a horde of Bloaters nearby, in which case they’d be forced to gather around volunteers for search and killing parties. Every man, woman, and kid living in town could be in danger right now.
There would be time to discuss it all, however, and that moment was not now.
“Get Joel inside,” Doc ordered then, moving aside to let John, Savannah, and Kristen into the clinic. The three of them were just able to carry Joel in, who kept mumbling unintelligible things in his tortured state, and put him on one of the beds.
After shutting the clinic doors, Tommy followed them in.
“Have you given him any morphine?” Doc asked him over the shoulder.
“Lost my backpack with the medicine during the commotion,” Tommy said, strained voice.
“Sit there,” Kristen ordered, pointing at another bed.
“I’m fine,” scowled the man, shrugging Kristen’s worries and orders, without taking his eyes off of Joel.
At that moment, James had put on a couple of gloves and sat in a chair by Joel’s side. He felt Joel’s pulse, clicked his tongue, then forced one of Joel’s eyes open to check the pupil’s reaction with a little lantern, and then the second one.
“You’re limping,” Kristen insisted.
“Do you really think I give a fuck?”
He shrugged off Kristen’s hand and approached the bed where Doc and James pursued their examination of his brother.
“Joel? You with me? Do you know who am I?” James asked.
“Ell. . . Ell. . .”
Without understanding Joel’s plea, either, Doc stood and gathered a pair of scissors, whereas Savannah damped a towel in lukewarm water to clean the blood and dirt off Joel’s body after James cut through his clothes.
They set to work carefully and efficiently, the result of experience. Sadly, life in Jacksonville wasn’t completely risk-free and Doc and his assistants had been forced to work together on a number of occasions patch a fellow friend or neighbor.
Soon enough, the clothes were done with and they could see the extent of the injuries. From the shoulder to the stomach, Joel had been butchered. Almost as if Jack the Ripper had gotten a whiff at him, Tommy scowled. And Kristen was worried about his pulled ankle. It was short of a miracle Joel was still alive, for Pete’s sake.
“Goddammit,” Doc scowled, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
He turned around towards the medicine cabinet and prepared a syringe of morphine. Joel seemed to recognize what that was and tried to wiggle his way out of bed.
“No. . .”
“You’ll feel much better in a second, Joel, I promise,” said James, almost warm voice.
“Don’t. . .” Joel replied again, making a very wrong move of attempting to leave his bed. He groaned out of pain and James restrained him back on the mattress, holding Joel by the uninjured shoulder.
“Stay right here,” he ordered, succinct. “He’s delusional, Doc, give him the morphine now.”
“Ellie. . .”
“Oh, not again,” scowled Tommy, turning away in frustration. He’d thought Joel had asked for Ellie a few times after the attack, but he’d hoped his brother was just confused and groggy concerning his whereabouts and time. He now knew he wasn’t. “Can somebody please get Ellie? I swear to god my stupid brother could be stranded in the middle of the desert and still ask for that girl before a mouthful of water.”
“I’ll get her,” Savannah nodded.
She left hurriedly to search for the girl, in the more than likely scenario she hadn’t yet heard about Joel’s condition. When she opened the door, she almost bumped into Maria on her way in.
“Over there,” Savannah said, pointing at the bed where Joel was lying.
Hastily, Maria headed over to the bed, resting a warm hand on Tommy’s shoulder. The man raised his arm not to let Maria near the bed to prevent interrupting Doc’s work. It was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
“How’s he?” Maria demanded.
“Not good,” Doc confessed.
By the look he gave them over the shoulder, Kristen and James were good enough assistants, and Doc didn’t need any spectators. Maria took Tommy aside, far enough from the bed, and yet not too close to the windows where half the town could see them. She also realized Tommy was limping, and feared that some of the blood on his clothes and face did belong to him and not Joel or that freaking Bloater, but she knew better than to point it out now. Joel was the priority at the moment, for one and all.
“A bloater?” Maria demanded, trying to keep her voice level nonetheless. “A fucking bloater?”
“Yes. . .”
“Are you alright?” Maria insisted, checking Tommy from head to toes for any injuries. The bloody shirt didn’t help her calm down, but he seemed unharmed. “Did he bite you or Joel?”
Before Tommy could answer and defuse everyone’s worst fears, the door opened again, a breeze of cold air hitting everyone inside—this time, it was Ellie. Her cheeks red, she hadn’t even put on her damned coat, and in her hastiness, she almost stumbled with her own two feet and fell to the floor. Maria caught her in her arms just in time.
“Joel!” the girl shrieked, looking for him across the clinic.
Everyone in the clinic fell silent at that moment, unsure of how to deal with the situation now that Ellie had appeared. The response only made the girl freak out more and she stopped breathing for a second or two, fresh tears falling down her cheeks.
“Joel,” she repeated. “Where. . .?”
“Doc’s with him now,” Tommy finally said, somehow pulling off a smile.
“He will be alright,” Maria attempted to reassure her.
Their word wasn’t good enough, apparently. Ellie slipped past Maria’s and Tommy’s arms and defenses and dashed straight to Joel’s bed. Without disturbing either Doc’s work, she leaned and knelt by the bedside, taking his hand. He stirred.
“Ellie?”
“Yes, it’s me, Joel. What the fuck happened?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied, his eyes focusing and unfocusing. He took a sharp breath and, with a grimace, he reached out his hand for hers. She took it carefully, scared to hurt him further. “What does. . . Matter. . . Is that I’m going to be. . . Just fine. You are not. . . You are not going to be alone. Do you. . . Do you understand?”
That was the longest string of words he’d managed to utter since the attack, excluding the copious number of curses and swearwords he’d uttered while Tommy had carried him to the horses. He now understood Joel had been trying to save up enough energy to comfort Ellie when they’d gotten back to town.
“I think I do,” nodded the girl.
“Good,” Joel approved, dropping his arm.
Upon him giving in to the drugs at last, and Ellie freaking out at him passing out, Tommy stepped to rest a hand on her shoulders. Joel had told him everything that had transpired after they first met in Jackson. . . Ellie would never have been able to sleep again during Joel’s convalescence if she hadn’t heard from him directly. It wasn’t going to be enough if he took too long to recover, but Joel did the best he could.
“Tell me he wasn’t bitten,” Maria asked in a whisper, so low that Ellie couldn’t hear her.
“He wasn’t. We’re both clean, I made sure of that,” Tommy promised.
For some years now, ever since he married Maria, they’d shared responsibility for the town and its citizens. The last thing he’d ever want to do was to let an outbreak happen in here, endangering their whole community and livelihood. He never would have brought Joel back if there was even the smallest chance that either of them could be infected.
No, were that the case, he and Joel would have written a note addressed to Maria and Ellie, and then shot each other in the head to spare them from changing and endangering their friends and neighbors. Someone would eventually find their horses and their notes—wild animals would probably take care of their corpses in time—and everyone back in town would understand. That’s how things worked nowadays, after all.
Maria knew it and read the truth in Tommy’s eyes. She wouldn’t have seen him or Joel again had they been infected.
“You took care of a bloater by yourself?” she asked.
“I. . .” Even though all that Maria needed, in the end, was a yes or no answer, Tommy couldn’t answer that one, couldn’t get a word in to rebuke her hurtful incredulity. He was still in shock and concerned.
It came out of fucking nowhere. They’d stopped at that freaking Library again, Joel wanted to get some more books, and when they went out and Tommy was distracted saddling his horse for the way back, the thing appeared from the woods. It was upon Joel in the blink of an eye, before either one of the Miller brothers could get their weapons nor fire a single shot. With a single blow, Joel was knocked out, a deep injury bleeding all over his right side. Tommy was almost out of ammo by the time he killed the goddamn thing. He couldn’t recall exactly how he’d gotten Joel on his horse and how he’d managed to get back to town before Joel had bled to death, really.
Maria saw the expression on his face, the terror in his eyes. “Here. Sit,” she instructed, pointing at a chair.
Stubborn—as stubborn as Joel was, after all—Tommy refused. As scared a person as he was over his brother’s recovery, there was someone else who, certainly, was even more scared and who needed their attention more than he did.
“Come with me, Ellie,” Tommy ordered, dragging the girl away from Joel and Doc. She wouldn’t have it, however. They could see there was no way she’d leave the clinic any time before Joel himself did.
Anticipating their needs and further requests, John stepped closer, as well. He rested his hand on Ellie’s shoulder and sat down with her on a bench, giving Tommy and Maria the chance to take care of more pressing matters at the moment. They included, of course, sitting down with a map, pinpointing the location where they’d been surprised by that bloater, and send a cleaning party over there, stat. Tommy might have managed a single bloater but they needed to make sure there were no more Infected. The attack happened way too close to home.
Despite the fright due to the attack, despite how horrifyingly scared he was for his brother, Tommy knew he wasn’t a priority here, either. He could wait. Joel was in good hands, now, and with any luck, he’d pull through.
No, the priority right now had another name altogether. He turned to look at Ellie, a shocked, confused, look in her eyes.
“It’s going to be alright, Ellie, you’ll see,” he promised with a tilted smile.
She wanted to believe him so badly. They had medicine, shelter, enough food, proper winter clothes, and were safe and sound from Infected and other humans. This situation in no way compared to the one Ellie and Joel faced a couple of years prior, after Joel had gotten fatally wounded. She was not alone anymore, and she counted on professional help to heal Joel, as well as family members to back her up.
Despite knowing all of that on a rational level, Ellie only managed a half-smile in return. After seeing the extent of Joel’s injuries, she couldn’t but be scared out of her mind. She settled on a chair, her eyes transfixed on Joel’s bed and Doc working on those awful-looking wounds. As long as he didn’t give up, there was hope, she told herself.