The tracks in the snow were fresh—human, not infected. Joel followed them anyway. He needed meat, and winter didn’t care who it starved.

He found them near a frozen culvert: a man about his age, rifle slung low, and a thin girl trailing close behind. They looked like a memory he didn’t want back—grit, hunger, and that desperate bond built on fear rather than love.

The man introduced himself as Reed, though Joel hadn’t asked. The girl didn’t speak. She kept her eyes down like she was waiting for permission to breathe.

They traveled together out of necessity more than trust. Reed moved like a man who’d spent too long measuring the world in threats. The girl followed because she had nowhere else to go.

As they walked, Joel watched the way Reed positioned her: always in front, always between him and whatever rustled in the trees. Not protective—strategic. Disposable.

Joel felt something old stir in him. Something he didn’t want to name.

They reached a thicket where the forest funneled tight. The air went wrong there—too quiet, too still. Then the infected came fast, bursting from the brush, snarling through the snow.

Reed reacted first—not by defending the girl, but by shoving her forward into the path of the nearest runner. She fell hard, hands scraping ice, screams choking in her throat as the infected clawed its way toward her.

Joel didn’t think. He moved like instinct: steel in his hand, knees in blood and frost, blade driving up through rotted bone. The body twitched once and collapsed beside her.

He looked up in time to see Reed already disappearing into the trees, boots kicking up powder as he fled. He never looked back.

Joel knelt beside the girl. She trembled, eyes wide, not from the attack but from the realization.

“He was supposed to help me,” she whispered, voice cracked. “He promised.”

Joel didn’t answer. He had made promises like that once—promises that sounded like protection but really just meant You’re mine to lose.

The girl wouldn’t walk if he left her. He carried her back toward Jackson, snow falling soft around them, quiet as a confession never spoken.

He told no one what truly happened. Not because it didn’t matter—because it did. Because Reed wasn’t just a cruel man in the woods.

He was a reminder of who Joel had been.

People asked what happened. Joel didn’t tell them much, just that she’d been alone and needed help. When they asked if he planned to stick around to check on her, he shrugged a non-answer that fooled no one.

But he returned the next morning. And the morning after that.

She didn’t talk much. She didn’t need to. Joel sat with her while she ate, fixed her coat, showed her how to restring a bow. He walked her through town on quiet afternoons, making sure she knew where safety began and ended.

It wasn’t protection—not the way Reed meant it. Not the old way Joel once had.

It felt careful. Earned.

She never asked why he stayed.

He never asked why she let him.

But sometimes, when the wind pressed against the walls and made the house creak like distant footsteps, Joel would wake and think of Reed running without looking back.

And he’d sit there in the dark, jaw clenched, heart tight, knowing exactly why he couldn’t leave her.

Not again. Not this time.