They left the cave before first light, Ethan's thigh wrapped tight and already stiff, each step a negotiation between him and the torn muscle.
The days fell into a hard rhythm. Move at dusk and dawn, when the light was low and the air still held some cool; rest through the white glare of midday, when the sun turned the plains into an anvil. Joel became a crutch in the most literal sense, his shoulder under Ethan's arm whenever the leg threatened to fold, his gruffness doing poor work hiding how closely he watched every step. Ellie walked on Ethan's other side, offering her small hand for balance on the uneven ground, her eyes flicking to his face every few minutes with a worry she didn't bother hiding anymore.
The hills flattened into sun-baked plains — cracked earth, scrub brush, heat shimmer standing on the horizon like water that receded as they walked. Dust worked into everything: their clothes, their teeth, the creases of Ethan's bandage. He learned to read his own body the way he'd once read trails — the deep throb that meant the wound was only angry, the sharp white flare that meant stop now — and he rationed himself the way they rationed water, because there was no more of him than there was of that.
At noon they found a dry wash with a lip of shade and stopped. Ethan sat with his back against the bank and unwound the bandage to check the wound — the holes puckered and angry, the skin around them hot. Joel looked, grunted, and rewound it tighter without being asked. Neither of them said anything about the heat coming off it. There was nothing useful to say.
On the third afternoon the heat won for a while. They were crossing a wide exposed flat, no shade for miles, the sun beating straight down, when Ethan's vision blurred at the edges and his good knee buckled. Joel's grip on his arm was the only thing that kept him off the ground.
"Easy," Joel said, not letting go. "We're stopping at those rocks. Then the tunnel at dusk."
The boulders threw thin shadows that barely counted as shade, the stone radiating the day's heat back at them. Ellie gave Ethan her water bottle first — "Sip. Don't argue." — and sat beside him while he drank, talking to keep him awake: the plot of the comic from the orchard, which she'd finished that morning; the tally marks on her rifle stock, and how many she guessed the dead man had needed them for. Her voice stayed steady, but her eyes kept going to the bandage, dark at the edges now, and her questions came a little too fast, like she was afraid of the quiet.
"You're doing good," she told him, when he handed the bottle back. "Really. Just keep going."
He managed a smile that cost him. "Working on it."
When the sun dropped low enough to look at, Joel glassed the plain with the binoculars and went still.
"Company." His voice went flat. "Three riders, dirt bikes, coming our way. Fifteen minutes, maybe less."
Ethan pushed upright, pain flaring white behind his eyes, and forced it down. "The tunnel — northwest, about a mile. Old railroad cut. We can't outrun them."
"We can't fight them either," Joel said. "Not like this. Not with you down to one leg."
Ethan's gaze moved across the plain, slow, taking inventory: the wind picking up out of the west, combing the scrub flat; a low sand dune off to their left, enough for a few seconds of cover; a patch of dead brush between them and the riders' line, brittle as paper. "Fire," he said. "Small one, in the brush. The smoke pulls them off their line and gives us cover to move. Wind's from the west — it'll carry our sound away from them and theirs toward us. We'll hear them coming."
"With what?" Ellie asked, eyes darting between him and the horizon.
Ethan nodded at the base of the nearest boulder, where something glinted in the low light — a half-crushed bottle, miraculously unbroken, a finger of amber liquid still in the bottom. Some scavenger's leavings. Lighter fluid.
Joel's grin was quick and feral. He was on his feet before Ethan finished talking, moving fast for a man his age, laying a thin trail of the fluid across the dead brush. He struck a match. The brush went up with a soft whump, and black smoke boiled into the sky, thick and sudden against the pale plain.
The riders veered toward it immediately, engines rising to a snarl, drawn by the smoke and what it promised.
"Now!"
They moved — Ethan half-carried between Joel and Ellie, his bad leg dragging, every step jarring fire up through the wound and into his hip. Ellie's arm was locked under his, her small frame taking more of his weight than it should have been able to, her breath coming in hard pulls beside him. Behind them the engines screamed closer, gears shifting, men's voices coarse with excitement. Warning shots cracked, dust kicking up at their heels.
Joel turned twice mid-stride to put a shotgun blast back toward the riders, the booms rolling across the flat, buying seconds with noise and keeping their aim honest.
Ethan's vision narrowed to Ellie's shoulder under his arm and the black rectangle of the tunnel mouth — closer, closer. His leg wasn't a leg anymore, just a broadcast of pain with a boy attached.
The tunnel mouth swallowed them into cool dark. Joel slammed the rusted gate shut behind them, the clang rolling away down the black throat of the tunnel and coming back as an echo. Outside, the bike engines circled, frustrated, curses muffled by stone — and then faded, giving up the dark for the smoke still burning on the plain.
Ethan slid down the damp wall, shaking, spent, the adrenaline draining out of him and leaving his whole body trembling. In the dark, Ellie's hand found his arm and stayed there.
"We... we made it," she breathed.
Joel sank down beside them, passing his water bottle to Ethan first, then to Ellie. He looked at the kid — pale, filthy, grinning through it despite everything — and shook his head.
"Damn right we made it. Kid, you got a knack for getting us into trouble — and pulling us out of it."
Ethan drank, and passed the bottle on, and the three of them sat in the dark with the gate's clang still echoing somewhere deep in the tunnel.