The wet, sickening sound of the raider’s jaw collapsing under Joel’s boot was immediately swallowed by the ragged snarl of the next attacker. Joel didn't have a second to secure his knife, the second raider was on him, a blur of a grimy canvas and desperate fury, driving him backward into the rusted shell of a dead car.

He was pinned. His left arm trapped beneath the man’s weight, his right struggling to keep the raider’s crude, serrated blade away from his throat. The world was nothing but muscle strain and the hot, metallic smell of the attacker’s breath.

Through the ringing in his ears, he heard you. You were struggling with the third raider a few feet away, your breath coming out in strained, whistling puffs. It was a perfect, merciless chokehold. One Joel taught you. Then, a sound that cut through the fight like a wire snap.

CRACK.

It was the sound of bone giving way, impossibly close and horrifyingly final. The man went instantly limp, crumpling beneath you. You didn't have time to register the kill. You were already stumbling, trying to find your balance, your chest heaving, your eyes searching for Joel.

That was when the fourth raider moved. He hadn't been attacking. He’d been waiting, silent and still. He carried a length of heavy, rusty rebar, sharpened to a brutish point. He darted from the shadows of a fallen stack of pallets, lunging with a predator’s calculated speed.

Joel was still fighting the man on his chest, but his eyes tracked the movement. The rebar spike went in just below your sternum.

The impact didn't make a crunch or a thud; it made a sound of rending, a noise like thick, wet cloth being violently torn. Your head snapped back, your eyes wide, but they didn’t focus on the raider. They locked onto Joel, and in them, he saw the sudden, impossible comprehension of what had just happened.

The raider, driven by pure, animal rage, didn’t pull the rebar out. He pressed in, pinning you against a concrete slab. And then, fulfilling the worst promise of the moment, he ripped the spike sideways, rotating the crudely forged metal in the wound.

Your gasp wasn't pain. It was a short, sharp hollow sound. The noise of all the air leaving the human body at once, replaced by nothing.

Blood, dark and arterial, bloomed instantly across your shirt, soaking the front like spilled wine. Your arms dropped to your sides, useless. The light in your eyes, fixed on Joel, flickered, replaced by a gray, vacant shock.

Joel felt the Raider on his chest suddenly become weightless. The man was still alive, still struggling, but Joel was gone. The grayness. The sudden, irreversible vacancy in your eyes. It slammed him back twenty years. He didn't see {{user}}; he saw a different face, pale and young, framed by moonlight. He remembered the precise, faint pressure of breath on his neck, a shallow, fluttering puff, the last whisper of life escaping before the weight in his arms became cold and final. That phantom sensation, the guilt of the last moment he couldn't hold onto, was his constant companion. He had carried that failure, that one single job he couldn't do, through two decades of hell.

Failure. Failure. Failure.

And now, seeing the rebar twist, seeing the light go out, the ghost was here again, sharp as the iron spike.

Is this how it ends? Another body he couldn't keep breathing?

Joel pushed his attacker off with a wild, inhuman strength, his world collapsing into the single, devastating image. The raider that stabbed her released the rebar and fled, leaving the spike sticking out of your chest like a terrible, iron stem.

And then, a sound that wasn’t yours. It was the sound of Joel. Not a word, not a scream of terror, but a raw, animal bellow of agony and blinding, paralyzing rage, torn from deep within his chest. The man he had just thrown off moved to attack again, but Joel didn’t even look at him. He was already running toward you, toward the wreckage of his past and present, toward the metal that had delivered his worst nightmare.