Chapter Text
day 1
Lori has never had her knees taken out from under her by sheer force of emotion before. It's a disconcerting experience, to say the least, but she takes no note of it- the way the floor rushes up to meet her, the way it blurs and disappears as she dissolves into violent, shrieking sobs. The skin on her knees tears and reformed, and all Lori wants is for it to stay broken, because pain means she can hurt, which means she can die.
She's never wanted the ability to die quite so much.
"Mommy, mommy, mommy, please, mommy, wake up," Lori's pleading and praying and begging, but her mom doesn't move, doesn't take in a breath and doesn't open her eyes and she doesn't come back.
She's not like her daughter. She doesn't come back.
Lori screams herself raw, that day. It's not hard to do, with the smothering ash and the burning smoke. She falls asleep next to her mother's body and buries her in a shallow grave in the morning. She never finds her sisters. It's barely two feet deep- Lori had no shovel and the earth was scorched solid. She'd dug every bit of it with her hands, breaking of the skin of her fingers open over and over again. It heals, it always fucking heals, but the bitterest part of Lori, something that used to be small and hidden in a dark part of her until she woke up in a wasteland and found her mother dead and it spread to cover her whole, desperately hopes to get a disease and die from it.
It's a childish hope.
Lori sleeps atop her mother's grave that night, a rope looped through a gold ring, the only thing she'd had the nerve to take from her mother's body, clutched in her bloody knuckles.
And then she tries something that doesn't work in the morning. She does not talk about it, becuase, as her mother liked to tell her- her mom, who made her breakfast every morning and protected her from the world and who smelt of vanilla and safety and her mother who was dead and gone- stop and think about the facts when you're lost.
So here are the facts.
1: Lori cannot seem to die.
2: Everyone else died. Every last one of them, all gone. They were gone away, leaving behind nothing but bodies in the streets and Lori. Lori Cortez and Death were old friends; in fact, she'd died about twice a year. She never stayed dead for long. She didn't know the date, the year, anything at all. The last thing she remembered, it was 2002 and she'd gotten home from school. It wasn't 2002 now, and-
3: Lori was born Delores Cortez on October 1st, 1989. You know how the story goes. .
4: When she was seven, she woke up after a fall from a hotel window (she was a reckless kid, and the powers never helped) to her mom crying over her body. At seven, Lori did not understand. At thirteen, clutching the body of her mother to her chest and trying to bring her back even though she knew she couldn't becuase death was the line she could not cross, she understood.
5: Pain is pain, but what she felt as she dug her mother's grave in the scorched dirt of the park they always visited together, that was different. Worse. Worse than death, worse than anything. Lori Cortez cried until the sun rose on the horizon, and she didn't stop crying until her mother lay sound in her grave.
day 245
Lori wonders, sometimes, why she tries to survive at all. By the second month, she's so clearly fighting to survive- a bandana around her nose and mouth, mostly-undamaged swimmers goggles over her eyes, carting around cans of food in the biggest backpack she could find.
The answer is always that dying is so much more unpleasant than surviving. It's thought to herself, bitterly, when she realizes she's going to become familiar with the taste of rat at some point of her godforsaken life. The real answer is that she's afraid of what she'll look like if she gives up.
Still, the sentiment remains, reminding herself of how utterly alone she's become, whispers floating around every burned corpse she found, every little thing reminding her that it wasn't always this painful, her life. It had been uniform skirts and going out for donuts with her mom when Lori got straight A's. Her past became her escape, and her present left a bitter taste in her mouth, of ash and loneliness.
She's been picking her way through the ruins of a highway that had long since seen its last car for the past week. Or was it two? Time works funny when nobody keeps track of the days. Lori hadn't realized how much the lives of strangers mattered to her until there weren't any strangers left. She missed them, her strangers.
The man who owned the bakery on the corner of the block would always be making bread when Lori walked to school, and she learned to associate the smell of fresh bread with sunrises and birdsong. Now the only thing she had left was the sunrises. The man who owned the bakery died and so did the birds and the walk to school.
The end of everything really puts things in perspective when you aren't included in the category of "everything", like what your heartbeat sounds like or that humans would go to extraordinary lengths to feel human. Like how few things truly mattered to her.
So very few that they all fit into her bag, which wasn't really a bag but rather a bedsheet she'd tied into a sack and whenever she finds a place to stay the night she'll lay her things on the ground and wrap herself in the sheets and pretend that when she wakes up it would be to her mother making pancakes for her before she goes to school.
She's made new memories now that she no longer had the old ones. Like the jingling of her grandmother and grandfather's wedding bands around her neck with when she'd go looking for a new place to sleep, tied together with a piece of twine. Her mother used to wear them the same way.
The rings were all Lori took from her body. The rings and the twine from the kitchen in her no-longer home. The twine and the rings and the jingling of having nowhere to sleep except everywhere because who the hell was gonna stop her? She doesn't fear death, she doesn't fear anything.
Lori Cortez runs on fumes and recklessness, dangerous things for someone like her.
In a week she'll be fourteen. Maybe a day or two it sooner, maybe a day later. She's lost count of the days and she can't bring herself to care.
She can see a used-to-town in the far-off distance. Maybe it had been a city before, not a town. Those words don't mean much, now. The difference between a city and a town was the number of people and people were something the world didn't have much left of anymore. There were no cities and no towns and no people. People meant more than one and there's only a person. One person. The last.
Lori, the last person. The last person, Lori.
day 253
Yesterday, Lori had turned fourteen. Or is that tomorrow? In the beginning, she'd kept a tally on the remnants of her home. When it became too painful to stay anymore, she'd scratch it into a piece of scrap metal from a car wreck she carried with her. She'd left it behind in the last town. She's left quite a lot of things behind in the places she used to sleep.
She'd had a watch in the beginning. It didn't need batteries and Lori kept it around because she'd worn a watch in the Before. That got abandoned, too, when the ticking of every second gone by made Lori feel more machine than human; and humans would go to extraordinary lengths to feel human. Human. Singular: Lori.
When she finally reaches the no-longer-a-city not-a-town, she wants to collapse, her knees are already half-buckling as she stumbles, but collapsing isn't something that Lori allowed herself to do. Starvation was one of the worst ways to go, and Lori isn't sure that if she collapsed like a corpse in the street, she'll have the strength to get up again.
The whole world was a mass grave, Lori realized at around the third week all alone, and it's a club exclusive to everyone but her.
When she sees the building, an odd, circular thing with a roof made of scrap metal, her first thought wasn't that someone clearly rebuilt the walls and added the roof, it was that in front of her stood a building with walls and a roof, a luxury she hadn't encountered since she'd needed to construct something similar last winter. Her frenzy over a pre-made shelter is completely justified, which is why, despite her utter exhaustion, she made it through the poor excuse of a doorway in seven seconds flat.
That scares the building's current occupant. Lori has lost some of her manners in the months since the world's ending. Forgive her for not speaking.
Neither expected to be put in such a situation, in which one lone survivor is pointing a hunting rifle at the other. It was, as usual, utterly silent until one of the two fills the void.
"Who the hell are you?" Asks the boy- and he is a boy, no older than her, and Lori doubts that when he stands from his seat he'll be taller, either-. His grip on the gun tightens to compensate for the way his hands shake. His voice cracks, stiff and hoarse from lack of use. Lori doesn't have an answer, her eyes wide beneath her goggles that she wore to keep the sun off her face.
There's no sunscreen in the apocalypse, you see.
Lori stands stock still for another moment before swaying, once, twice, and then collapsing completely. The combination of dehydration, shock, and exhaustion became altogether too much, and she welcomes the darkness that envelops her.