Set Me Free ▪︎ Joel Miller ▪︎

▪︎○ Twenty Six ○▪︎

Their screams echoed in her ears, twisting her heart with pity and anger. Their bodies lay lifeless now with the woman's empty brown eyes staring right at her.

It was haunting.

"Liv?"

Joel reaches his hand out to rest on her shoulder, softly shaking it to gain her attention. It takes him a few long seconds to do so but eventually her sad green eyes shift to meet his concerned hazel ones.

"There ain't nothin' we coulda done." he gently told her.

Olivia nodded, her gaze straying back towards the lifeless couple outside the window - the couple they had just watched be massacred by a group of hunters travelling in a military truck.

Her heart clenched with sympathy and the hint of guilt for not interfering, even with the knowledge that Joel was right in what he had said.

The image ingrained itself in her mind; the empty eyes, the pool of blood, the pained desperate cries for help. It was there, prepared to haunt her for the rest of her days on this shitty earth.

"I know," she breathes sadly before turning and slipping past him with her head dipped down.

Joel watches her go and then, with a short glance to the couple outside, he sighs and follows she and Ellie up the set of stairs. However, when he reaches the top of the stairs he finds Ellie alone and looking off towards the room ahead with worry in her green eyes. He hears the familiar gargling and struggling echo from within the room and immediately he is able to dissect exactly what was happening.

Olivia found herself staring at the knife in her hand, watching as the blood dripped from the blade and splattered on the concrete below her boots. She pinched her brows together and shook her head at the sight and with a quick wipe along the weapon, she placed it back in its sheath and turned to leave the room.

"You good?"

She nods to Joel, "all clear," she confirms with a small smile, one it took effort to muster.

The older man smiles briefly and glances up ahead, then with a short head gesture, he directs them back down to the street below and towards an alley that leads to the open back entrance of a small convenience store.

He slows beside the open back door, cautiously scanning the interior before beckoning for the two females to follow him inside. "Stay close," he whispers, his ears already having picked up on the few voices echoing from the room just next door.

They crouched down, out of view of the three hunters pacing the store and the military type truck that sat outside directly opposite the space they hid within.

Olivia glared at the area she heard the voices echoing from, hearing them talk so casually about cans of bacon they had found whilst a dead body remained strapped to the front of the truck infuriated her to her core.

These guys were the very definition of evil.

She hated them.

"This way, we should be able to sneak by 'em."

She nodded in acknowledgement to Joel whilst reaching out and taking Ellie's hand, both to calm her raging emotions and to keep the teen close and safe. Joel took point, leading the pair down a side alleyway and up across the street, hiding behind various rotten cars. Until, eventually, they came upon another back entrance to a building just a mere street away, somehow managing to have avoided being caught by any of the stray hunters or the military truck.

They rushed through the building, climbing the fire escape and shuffling along the edge of a building until they reached a wide open window of an apartment complex.