No Permission to Quit

"Turns out the secret to walking when your body's completely given up is having a bloke who'll kick your ribs until you remember you don't actually want to die. Unconventional motivational technique. Very effective."

The afternoon tried to kill me.

Not quickly. Not mercifully. But slowly, methodically, with the patient cruelty of a world that had no investment in my survival. The sun pressed down like a physical weight. The ground radiated heat back up through my bare feet. And somewhere between those two forces, I was being crushed.

We'd been walking for hours. Or maybe it had only been one hour. Or maybe it had been days. Time had become elastic, stretching and compressing in ways that defied logic. All I knew for certain was the rhythm—lift, place, transfer weight, repeat—and the pain that accompanied each iteration.

My feet had stopped bleeding at some point. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. The blisters had burst, the raw skin had been scoured by dust and grit, and now everything below my ankles existed in a state of constant, throbbing agony that had become almost background noise. Almost.

Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.

The mantra was all that kept me moving. Not thought—thought required energy I didn't have. Not hope—hope was a luxury for people who could see beyond the next step. Just the rhythm. The mechanical repetition of a body that had forgotten how to do anything except continue.

Nelson walked ahead of me, maintaining the same steady pace he'd held all day. He didn't look back. Didn't check on me. Just moved through the landscape like he belonged to it, his boots finding purchase on terrain that seemed determined to trip me with every step.

How is he not tired? The question drifted through my mind like smoke. How is he not dying?

But I knew the answer, didn't I? He was adapted. Hardened. Whatever life he'd lived before this—whatever had carved those scars into his skin and put that coldness in his eyes—had prepared him for exactly this kind of punishment. He'd been forged in fires I couldn't imagine, and now he moved through this wasteland like it was nothing more than a morning stroll.

I had not been forged. I had been... assembled, maybe. Cobbled together from whatever parts were available—a bit of stubbornness here, a bit of desperation there, held together by the fading memory of a mother who expected me to come home.

Mum.

The thought surfaced unbidden, and I shoved it back down. Thinking about Mum wouldn't help. Thinking about anything except the next step wouldn't help.

Left foot. Right foot. Left foot—

My toe caught on something. A rock. Hardened dust. My own exhaustion. It didn't matter. What mattered was the sudden, sickening lurch as my balance failed, the world tilting sideways, the ground rushing up to meet me.

I hit hard.

Shoulder first, then hip, then the side of my head bouncing off packed earth with enough force to send stars cascading across my vision. For a moment, I just lay there—face pressed into the dust, lungs heaving, every nerve ending screaming in unified protest.

Get up.

The command came from somewhere inside me. Some stubborn, stupid part that refused to accept what was happening.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

I tried. Got my hands under me. Pushed. Felt my arms tremble, shake, and then collapse, dumping me back into the dirt.

Can't.

The word was terrifying in its simplicity. Not won't. Not don't want to. Can't. My body had reached some fundamental limit, crossed some threshold beyond which willpower meant nothing.

Footsteps approached. Stopped beside my head.

"Get up."

Nelson's voice. Cold. Flat. Expectant.

"I can't," I said into the dirt. The words came out muffled, broken. "I can't. I'm done."

Silence. I could feel him standing there, looking down at me, making calculations I couldn't see.

Then the boot connected with my ribs.

The pain was sharp and immediate—not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to matter. I gasped, curled in on myself instinctively, arms wrapping around my midsection as if that could protect me from whatever came next.

"Get up."

"I told you, I can't—"

Another kick. Same spot. Harder this time. I felt something shift in my chest—a rib bruising, maybe, or muscles tearing. The pain blossomed outward, red and hot and all-consuming.

"Every minute we spend here is a minute closer to nightfall," Nelson said. His voice hadn't changed. Still cold. Still flat. Like he was discussing the weather rather than beating a man who couldn't stand. "And you do not want to be caught in the open when the sun goes down."

The things in the darkness. The memory surfaced through the haze of pain. The growling. The hunting.

"I can't walk," I said. "My legs—"

"Your legs work fine. Your mind has decided to quit. Your mind is wrong."

He crouched down. I felt his hand grip my hair—a fistful of it, right at the roots—and then he was pulling, hauling my head up so I was forced to look at him.

His face was inches from mine. Those ice-chip eyes boring into me with an intensity that felt like physical pressure. Up close, I could see details I'd missed before—the fine lines around his eyes, the way the scars on his scalp caught the light, the complete and utter absence of anything resembling mercy.

"You don't get to quit," he said. "You don't get to decide you're done. I didn't drag you through the night, didn't keep you alive through the hunting, didn't waste food and water on you just to watch you give up in the dirt."

"Then leave me." The words came out ragged, desperate. "If I'm such a burden, just leave me here. Let me die."

Something flickered in his expression. Not sympathy—never sympathy—but something.

"You want to die?" he asked.

Did I? The question cut through the fog of pain and exhaustion, demanding an honest answer.

No.

The response was immediate and absolute. Whatever else I was—broken, exhausted, terrified—I wasn't ready to die. I'd already died once, and I'd fought my way back from it. I'd clawed out of the void, gasped back into existence, refused to stay dead when every law of nature said I should.

I wasn't going to give up now. Not here. Not in the dirt at Nelson's feet.

"No," I said aloud. "No, I don't want to die."

"Then get up."

He released my hair. Stood. Stepped back.

I lay there for a moment longer, gathering whatever scraps of strength remained. My ribs throbbed where he'd kicked me. My scalp burned where he'd grabbed me. Every muscle in my body felt like it had been replaced with wet rope.

But I got up.

Hands first. Then knees. Then one foot, planted in the dust, trembling but holding. Then the other foot.

Standing.

The world swayed around me, grey spots dancing at the edges of my vision, but I was standing. Upright. Vertical.

"Good," Nelson said. "Now walk."

I walked.

The next hour was the worst of my life.

Worse than the day they'd killed me. Worse than waking up in a strange tent with a throat full of stitches. Worse than anything I'd experienced in nineteen years of a life that hadn't always been easy.

Every step was a battle. Every metre was a war. My body had moved beyond pain into some new territory I didn't have words for—a state of existence where agony was just the baseline and everything else was built on top of it.

I fell twice more. Each time, Nelson was there with his boot and his cold commands, his complete unwillingness to accept that I might have reached my limit. Each time, I dragged myself back up, fuelled by something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite fear but burned like both.

He's not going to let me stop, I realised somewhere in the middle of that endless hour. He's going to keep kicking me until I move or until I'm actually dead. There's no in-between with him.

The understanding should have been terrifying. Instead, it was almost clarifying. I knew where I stood now. I knew the rules of this game. Keep moving or be beaten. Keep moving or be left behind. Keep moving or die.

One step at a time, I told myself, though Mum's voice had faded into something more like my own. One step at a time, you stupid bastard. That's all you have to do.

The terrain changed as we walked. More rocks. More ridges. The flat, open ground giving way to something rougher, more broken. The mountains loomed larger than ever, close enough now that I could see individual features—the dark mouths of caves, the texture of the stone, the way the late afternoon light painted the peaks in shades of amber and rust.

Close, I thought. We're getting close.

But close to what? Shelter, Nelson had said. Safety. The caves would protect us from whatever came out at night. But after that? What happened when we reached the mountains? What happened to me?

The questions circled through my mind, unanswered and unanswerable. I filed them away with all the other things I couldn't afford to think about.

One step at a time.

The sun began to descend.

I watched it happen with a mixture of relief and dread. Relief because the heat was finally, finally beginning to ease—the brutal pressure of midday giving way to something more bearable. Dread because I knew what darkness brought in this place.

The things that hunt.

We weren't going to make it to the mountains. I could see that now. The caves were still kilometres away, and the light was fading faster than we could walk. Whatever shelter we found tonight, it wouldn't be in the safety of rock and stone.

Nelson seemed to have reached the same conclusion. His pace changed—still steady, still relentless, but with a new urgency underlying it. He was scanning the terrain now, looking for something. Evaluating. Calculating.

"There," he said finally, pointing toward a cluster of rock formations perhaps half a kilometre ahead. "We'll stop there."

Half a kilometre. Thirty minutes of walking, maybe, in my current state. An eternity.

But the sun was still above the horizon. The darkness hadn't come yet. And the promise of stopping—of actually, finally stopping—was enough to keep me moving.

We reached the rocks as the last light bled from the sky.

The formation was larger than it had looked from a distance—a tumbled collection of boulders and stone slabs that had fallen against each other in some ancient geological catastrophe, creating a maze of gaps and hollows and hidden spaces. Nelson moved through it with the confidence of someone who had done this before, leading me deeper into the formation until we reached a space that was almost cave-like—three walls of stone rising around us, a slab of rock overhead providing cover, the entrance narrow enough to defend.

"Here," he said. "This will do."

I didn't wait for permission. The moment the word was out of his mouth, my legs gave out.

I went down in stages—first to my knees, then to my hands, then flat on my back with my arms spread and my chest heaving. The stone beneath me was hard and uncomfortable and absolutely perfect. I was lying down. I wasn't moving. For this moment, for this single precious moment, I didn't have to do anything except exist.

The sky above me was darkening rapidly, that deep blue-purple that preceded full night.

You're still alive, I told myself. Somehow, impossibly, you're still alive.

The thought brought no particular emotion with it. No triumph. No relief. Just a kind of dull acknowledgment, like checking an item off a list.

Still alive. Check. What's next?

Nelson moved around the space, doing whatever it was he did to secure a campsite. I heard sounds—the rustle of his rucksack, the scrape of stone on stone, the soft clink of objects being arranged—but I didn't turn to look. Couldn't have, even if I'd wanted to. Moving my head felt like an impossibility on par with walking to the moon.

"Eat."

Something landed on my chest. Another muesli bar, from the feel of it. I picked it up, unwrapped it, ate it mechanically. My jaw ached from the effort of chewing. My throat burned with each swallow. But I ate, because eating was survival, and survival was all I had left.

When the bar was gone, I let the wrapper fall from my fingers and closed my eyes.

Jamie.

The thought came unbidden, sneaking past my defences while I was too exhausted to keep it out.

Does he know I'm gone? Is he looking for me?

I imagined him back at the camp—if the camp had survived the attack. Imagined him searching the tent, finding my mattress empty, finding Henri cowering alone with those sad, wide eyes. Imagined the realisation dawning, the fear taking hold.

He'll come, I told myself. He'll find a way.

But the mountains loomed in my mind, vast and unknowable. And between here and there stretched kilometres of wasteland I'd barely survived crossing. How would Jamie find me? How would anyone find me?

He'll come.

The words felt hollow. Felt like a prayer offered to a god I wasn't sure existed.

But I clung to them anyway. Because the alternative—the thought of being truly alone, truly abandoned, trapped in this place with no hope of rescue—was more than I could bear.

"Sleep."

Nelson's voice cut through my thoughts. I opened my eyes to find him settling against the opposite wall of our shelter, his back to the stone, his eyes already scanning the darkness beyond our narrow entrance.

"We move at first light," he said. "If you can't walk tomorrow, I'll leave you."

It wasn't a threat. Not really. Just a statement of fact, delivered with the same cold pragmatism he applied to everything. He would leave me if I became too much trouble. He would cut his losses and move on, and I would die alone in this wasteland, and that would be the end of Joel Gibbons.

"I'll walk," I said.

"We'll see."

He fell silent. I stared at the darkening sky, watching the last light fade from a world that had tried its very best to break me.

You didn't break, I told myself. You bent. You cracked. But you didn't break.

It wasn't much. But it was something.

I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.