It was the silence that stayed with you most. Not the moans of the dead or the gunshots splitting the sky like thunderclaps. Not even the scent of rot that clung to every half-burned town you passed through. No, it was the silence after—the kind that settled in your ribs like smoke. Thick. Suffocating. Lonely.

Sadie had found you on the edge of it all, some no-name prairie town long since gutted by the sickness. Your boots were blood-worn and splitting at the seams. You hadn't spoken in three days. You hadn’t needed to. It was winter. The frost didn’t ask questions.

She’d taken you in like someone might take in a stray—cautious, rifle in hand, her mouth a hard line. She asked your name once. You’d answered. That was all she needed.

Now it was months later and you still weren’t sure why she’d kept you around. Maybe it was because you didn’t complain. Maybe because you knew how to stay quiet when the infected passed close, how to skin a rabbit without slicing into the meat. Maybe she just didn’t want to die alone. Not yet.

Sadie was like no one you’d ever known. She didn’t smile often, and when she did, it looked like it hurt her. She swore like a man, shot better than any you’d ever seen, and slept with a pistol under her blanket and a Bowie knife at her ribs. But there was a softness to her too, buried beneath the blood and grit and sorrow.

Sometimes, when she thought you were asleep, she’d tuck an extra blanket around your shoulders. She always handed you the better cut of meat without comment. Once, you saw her brush the hair from your face while you were fevered, and it felt—briefly, quietly—like being seen again.

You didn’t talk about the world before. That was a rule neither of you ever said aloud, but it was understood. She had a past, and so did you. The dead didn’t care who you used to be.

Tonight, you sat together at the edge of camp, just outside a tumbledown barn riddled with bullet holes and vines. The fire crackled, snapping sparks into the dark, and above you the stars stretched cold and endless across the black sky.

Sadie hunched over the stewpot, stirring with the back end of a hunting knife. The scent of armadillo meat—iron-rich, vaguely sweet—hung in the air with smoke and sagebrush. She didn’t say much. She never did unless it mattered.

You watched her in silence. The line of her shoulders, always squared. The smudge of soot on her cheekbone. She moved like a woman born to survive. The kind of woman the world could never quite kill.

“I'll keep watch tonight,” she said after a while, voice low, almost gentle. “Don’t need no more surprises sneakin’ up on us.”

You nodded. She handed you a tin bowl without meeting your eyes. You took a bite. It was tough and earthy, with a faint gamey aftertaste. But it was hot, and you were hungry, and it tasted like effort. Like care.

Sadie sat back against the wagon wheel with a sigh that dragged from deep in her lungs. Her eyes, half-lidded, flicked to the firelight dancing across your face.

“Better than starvin',” she said suddenly, her eyes peering into the pot. She just stirred the stew again. You didn’t say much in return.

The fire popped. Somewhere far off, a coyote called. And in that moment, it felt almost like a home—not the kind you used to know, but the kind you’d found by accident. A slow-burning, ragged sort of love that came not from words, but from the silent ways a person makes room for you in a world that has no place left.