Don't mind me, just over here kicking my feet and screaming into a pillow over this art that @bumblepony commissioned from @kenobiwanx 😭 Love you, Bumble. ❤️
As seen in chapter 15 of Save Me a Place.
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She pulls the knife free with a sickening sound and pushes herself off the body, staggering slightly in the current. Her face cranes up toward the ridge – invisible now, lost behind the rain and the dark and the steep walls of the ravine. Then she looks back at him, and there's something almost frantic that crosses her face. "Stupid!" she cries over the wind. "Why would you – you could’ve broken your neck – stupid –"
"Yeah," he grits out, and he's already reaching for her, hinging one hand under her elbow, gripping hard enough that he can feel the bones of her arm through her soaked jacket. "Yeah, I know. Yell at me later – we gotta move."
He pulls her forward and she takes one step, two – and on the third her leg folds beneath her and she makes a terrible sound, a sharp yelp, her fingers clamping down around his forearm. Her whole body lists sideways into him, and he has to brace to keep them both upright.
"My ankle," she says through her teeth. "I can't – no –" She tries to put weight on it again and sucks a breath in hard through her nose. "Tommy –"
There's a sudden crash from above, something heavy tearing through brush and snapping branches; they both flinch and look up at the same time, toward the rim of the ravine that's barely visible through the curtain of rain. For a second there's nothing, just the dark and the sound of something sliding, and then a shape comes over the edge, half-falling, half-scrambling, its limbs working in that awful, disjointed way infected do. It hits the slope and tumbles, cartwheeling through the mud and the undergrowth, and crashes into the shallows six feet from where they're standing with a splash that sends brown water spraying across both of them.
Tommy doesn't hesitate. He raises his pistol and he fires before the thing has even finished rolling over, before it's done more than lift its head from the water. The round catches it just above the eye and it drops, instantly, boneless and face-down in the quickly-rising creek, but before Tommy can even blink there’s another crash, another shape spilling over the lip of the ravine, sliding and tumbling down the slope in a spray of mud and gravel. And behind it – behind it – a third, already halfway down and moving fast enough that it’s nearly pacing the other shape –
Tommy turns to her, screaming over the rain, "Put your arm around me! Right now!"
She does, with no argument. She slings her arm across his shoulders and he wraps his around her waist, hitching her up hard against his side, taking as much of her weight as his body will allow him to. She trembles against him, her jaw wired shut against another sound of pain as her bad ankle drags through the current. Her knife is still in her other hand, held low and close to her thigh, gripped tight between bloodless fingers.
"Go," she urges him. "Go!"
