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“Fuck.”
It’s about the understatement of the year, Joel thinks as he stares at the bodies strewn across the floor of the hospital. Most are unfamiliar, but among the strangers are Marlene’s dead eyes staring up at him, her face permanently twisted into an expression of fear and disappointment.
Or maybe his own twisted mind is just playing tricks on him.
Marlene’s lying just a few feet from the guy who must have been the Fireflies’ doctor — the same man who was attempting to develop some kind of cure for the infection.
Now they’re both gone.
And he hears Ellie again say, “Fuck.”
This is an old story.
Joel doesn’t know where he first heard it, but it must have been back in Texas, sometime in those first few months after the outbreak — they’re working on a vaccine. Or maybe it wasn’t until Boston, when enough time had passed that people started getting hopeful again — there will be an antidote soon, there’s been a breakthrough, it’s really true this time.
Or maybe it was in that first fateful truck ride, during what ended up being the last few minutes of Sarah’s life. Maybe she was the first to bring it up — if it’s a disease, they can find a cure, right Dad?
He can’t remember.
(He hates that he can’t remember.)
Whenever it was, he’s heard the fairy tale of a vaccine enough over the past 20 years to believe it’s just that — a fairy tale. Something parents tell their kids to make them feel better. Marlene’s no fool. If she says they can do it, they can do it.
So finding out it was all for naught isn’t exactly the overwhelming shock that maybe it should’ve been. Besides, he thinks as he glances toward the kid, he was never really here for the vaccine, anyway.
“So now what?” Ellie finally asks. He has no real answer, but she can pretty much read him like a book by now, and what he’s thinking must be written all over his face. “Is it just fucking over?”
Joel sighs.
For some reason, they keep heading west.
It’s a bad idea. Joel knows it’s a bad idea, knows they should be heading back to Jackson, where a house with hot running water and a wall between them and everything dangerous is just sitting there waiting for them. Not to mention his brother — his family — whose words he’s holding onto like a lifeline (it’s dangerous, but it’s nothing you can’t handle) while attempting to ignore his own (I’m just gonna get her killed, I know it).
But Ellie’s family, too. And Joel’s promise to Tess haunts him as much as anything else these days, so for whatever goddam reason he’s not sure either of them can really fathom, he and the kid keep heading west through the wilderness, pretending that they weren’t too late and haven’t completely blown their mission to save the world. Pretending that the world can even still be saved and that they’re not both just trapping themselves in a fairy tale of their own goddam making.
At least they have a truck again, courtesy of the Fireflies’ cache of supplies (or at least whatever was left of it, after that final, fatal fight with FEDRA). Driving around aimlessly is a lot better than walking around aimlessly.
Especially with a working tape deck, although the only music they have is a mixtape someone once upon a time hastily labeled ‘hits of the ‘80s’ and it feels like a bad omen.
“’80s,” Ellie notes dryly. “Trouble.”
He can’t disagree.
They’re not long out of the city when Ellie brings it up. “How well did you know Marlene?”
He’s been trying not to think about it, to be honest. The carnage in the hospital that was meant to be a place of salvation. Marlene wasn’t exactly someone Joel held dear, but the bodies have been piling up for a long time and even though this one isn’t his fault, her death is just another loss he’ll have to learn how to carry.
“Well, she wasn’t my friend. She hurt people as much as any of us did, and she got Tommy’s mind all twisted up crazy when she recruited him.” His brother’s fine now, though, Joel knows. And he wouldn’t bet on Marlene ever doing anything worse than the things he himself has done. In the end, she was trying to help everyone, which is more than he can say for his own damn conscious. “But I reckon she didn’t deserve what happened.”
Ellie’s quiet. She’s been quiet ever since… well.
“Anyone else would have shot me,” she says eventually. Joel realizes she’s talking about that first bite, from before they met, and he suddenly knows he’s got something to be grateful for from Marlene, too.
Trouble finds them soon enough.
Not the kind of trouble that starts and ends with a shootout or an attack from a clicker, but trouble nonetheless. There’s a rainstorm followed by a freeze, and the truck hits a patch of ice that sends them spinning into a shallow ditch. It’s the kind of thing that could have happened in the world as it used to be, which itself is a strange enough feeling.
“Jesus, dude, don’t give yourself a heart attack. You’re like a hundred years old.”
Joel rolls his eyes. He’s down in the ditch, at the front of the truck, trying to push it backwards up onto the road. Ellie’s in the driver’s seat and is supposed to be on steering and accelerator duty but seems to be more interested in making sarcastic comments at his expense. “Put it in reverse.”
“It is in reverse.”
“You’re giving it gas?”
She responds by revving up the engine, and with his face right next to the hood, the sound is doing wonders for his already bad hearing. And the truck still doesn’t move. “Alright, alright, stop!”
Ellie half-climbs out of the cab while he sits by one of the tires, indulging in a much-needed break and trying not to worry about whether he’ll be able to get back up again. She squints at him, probably trying to decide if he’s dying. “You know, walking’s not so bad.”
(It takes another hour, and they’re down to the dregs on gasoline, but Joel manages to get the truck back onto the pavement with minimal damage to either himself or the vehicle, and he can’t help but smirk afterward. “You were saying?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go, old man.”)
The dreams don’t go away. He can tell by the way he wakes up with the same, sinking, empty feeling in his chest and the panic in his throat that’s so routine it’s almost normal.
It’s gotten worse since the day he woke up in the basement of an unfamiliar house, alone and disoriented, a knife in his hand and the hole in his side knitting itself tightly into a scar, with his kid nowhere to be found. He thinks it’s worse for her, too — sometimes when the nightmares jolt him out of sleep, he turns over to find she’s already awake and watching him, wide-eyed and scared, like she’s seeing a ghost.
“What do you think happened?” Ellie asks over another Chef Boyardee dinner. “Back at the hospital?”
“You saw it,” he grunts around a mouthful of canned ravioli. More than a few of the corpses they stumbled upon were outfitted with tactical vests adorned with an all-too familiar insignia. “FEDRA.”
“Yeah, but… they couldn’t have known, right? About the vaccine? Why would they…” Ellie shakes her head, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. “They wouldn’t have attacked the hospital, if they knew.”
“Maybe they did,” Joel says. In this world, a cure means power, and it sounds just like the FEDRA he knows to opt for blowing up any chance of a vaccine rather than allow an ungovernable group like the Fireflies to control it. He immediately wishes he could take it back, though, when he sees the way Ellie absorb the words like someone taking a punch.
Then she asks, “Do you think they know about me?”
Once his heart starts beating again, Joel takes a moment to think it through and realizes — or at least convinces himself — that it’s unlikely. Because, “They’d still have been there if they did. Besides, it’s not like FEDRA needs a reason to start a fight with the Fireflies.”
Ellie seems placated by that, and though Joel’s not much for religion, he’s willing to hope to any kind of higher power that might be listening that it’s true.
The panic attacks don’t go away, either.
It comes at night, when he’s keeping watch alone and letting himself wonder what the hell is it they’re doing out here, exactly, where monsters roam. It comes in the daylight, too, with a knot in his chest that’s seized up so tight that it feels like he’s trying to suck air through a straw and Ellie’s beside him saying Joel, pull over and then she’s in front of him making him count to 10 and then he’s lying that he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.
It’s worse now, though, because it’s not just him anymore. Sometimes it’s Ellie who wakes up gasping, and it’s him who’s in front of her saying, you’re with me and it’s him who has to hold her back to reality as she swipes at her face like she’s expecting to find someone else’s blood.
(Although he has his theories, Ellie’s never told him exactly what happened in Silver Lake, and he’s not sure she ever will.)
“Maybe it wouldn’t have even worked,” Ellie says. She’s pacing in circles outside another abandoned gas station while he siphons out water disguised as fuel barely a quart at a time. “It didn’t work with Sam. Maybe it was impossible. Maybe this whole thing was fucking stupid and none of it even fucking mattered and everything we’ve been through and everyone who died was just… Well, you know what? Fuck this goddam shitty world. And fuck everyone who wants to save it.”
She walks toward the truck, climbing inside and slamming the door shut behind her. Joel lets her go without a word.
He knows grief when he sees it.
There’s no such thing as destiny.
Some people would argue with that. Some people would say — and Joel’s heard it himself — that the outbreak was always meant to be, that the people who died were always meant to die, and that those left standing were always meant to be the ones to survive and rebuild and keep a semblance of civilization going.
But that’s all bullshit.
Joel doesn’t know exactly what ideas Marlene put into Ellie’s head about being the key to the cure, but from the way the kid talked about saving the world, he’s guessing Marlene used a version of the same ‘greater purpose’ speech she spun for Tommy way back when. And Joel wasn’t around to give the ‘that sounds like bullshit’ speech he gave to his brother. Not that Tommy listened. Not that Ellie would either, then or now.
“Hey,” he calls. It’s another cold night, so they’re sleeping in the truck, Joel crammed into the front seat and Ellie in the back.
“What?” she answers in a flat tone.
“I got a joke for you. It’s a good one. It’s about construction.”
She huffs at him in annoyance and impatience, but there’s also genuine interest, he can tell. “Well don’t leave me hanging.”
“Alright, it goes like… actually, you know what? I’m still working on it.”
There’s a moment of silence. And then, “Oh, you asshole.”
Twice in his life he’s fallen asleep laughing, and both times it’s been because of her.
“Your hearing’s getting worse,” Ellie says, and it sounds like an accusation. “Isn’t it?”
It’s true that the music has dulled, the birds don’t sing nearly as much as they used to, and the fork scraping against his breakfast plate isn’t as loud as it should be. It’s also true that none of that is anything he wants her to worry about. “I’m fine.”
Ellie scoffs. “If you say so.”
The truck finally craps out on them somewhere in the Great Basin. It had to happen sooner or later, and frankly, Joel is surprised they made it this far. It’s probably for the best anyway, since fuel is getting harder and harder to come by in the desert, and the scarcity makes him more than usually worried about running into raiders. Or hunters. Or fucking cannibals. Or goddam anyone, really.
Although maybe he shouldn’t be. No one’s foolish enough to try making it out here, in the middle of nothing but barren wasteland.
No one, that is, except for the two of them.
Ellie sees the look on his face when he slams shut the engine hood, having given up on trying to fix the damn thing. “I’m guessing that means we’re walking.”
“Well, I ain’t carrying you,” Joel says, smiling at the way she rolls her eyes.
The thing about walking is it’s a goddam nightmare. It’s hell on the feet, and the knees, and the back, and everything all the way up to the top of the head, and the fact that they’ve left the Rockies behind and Joel’s not trying to climb a mountain for once does little to lessen the pain.
Ellie’s out in front of him, bolstered by the boundless energy of youth. “Keep up, old man. How are we going to find the Fireflies if you’re this wiped out after hiking a few hours?”
“Is that what we’re doing? I thought we were wandering around aimlessly.” He stops when he sees her stop, and Ellie turns to face him, her expression solemn.
“We still have to finish what we started,” she tells him.
He sort of wonders what happened to maybe it wouldn’t have even worked and fuck this goddam shitty world, but Joel knows his kid well enough to know that she’s not going to let go of hope that easily, the occasional angry rant notwithstanding. And hope, like grief, is often a zigzag, anyway.
They keep moving.
He wakes up one morning completely deaf in his right ear. There’s an ache, too, whenever he moves too sharply, like someone’s got a drill to his eardrum and is intermittently giving it power in quick, clumsy bursts. That ear has hurt before, though, and it was only a matter of time before it went kaput, so Joel mostly tries to ignore it as he slowly packs up their meager supplies.
It must have been another cold night because he can’t stop shivering. “Jesus, it’s freezing.”
Ellie stares at him like he’s crazy. “No, it’s not. Like, not even a little bit. Figured you’d know that since you’re covered in sweat, which is gross by the way.”
“What?” he asks, confused. He wipes a hand across his forehead and it comes away damp as the drill in his head once again turns itself on, sending another stab of pain through his busted ear.
They both realize what it means at the same time, but Ellie’s the one who says it. “You’re sick.”
“I’m fine,” Joel insists, shaking his head. He can’t keep moving if he’s sick, and if he can’t keep moving, they’ll both die. So he’s fine. He’s fine.
He’s not fine.
Earaches have come and gone many times over the years. Always on the right side, and only since… well, since he flinched. Those pains, though, only ever lasted a few days at most before clearing up on their own, which Joel always counted as good luck because to be sick in the QZ meant either having to beg FEDRA for help or going through the smuggling channels, and that would come with the unfortunate consequence of potentially alerting people he was on less than friendly terms with of any weaknesses. Better to pretend it’s not happening and wait for it to go away, which it always did.
Until now.
It’s been almost a week, and instead of getting better, he’s only getting more sick, staggering and stumbling through the wilds with Ellie, who’s less than happy about how Joel’s been taking care of himself.
Or not taking care of himself, the way she puts it.
“What the fuck do you think is going to happen to me if you collapse out here, huh?” Ellie rants at him. “You know, it wasn’t super fucking fun watching you almost die the first time, and I’m not real excited for that to happen again.”
She’s right. He knows she’s right. He’s not going to last if he keeps this up, and if he dies, she dies.
Simple as that.
“I’m not dying,” Joel tells her. “We need to get to a town. That’s our best chance to find medicine.”
Ellie nods, accepting his directive. “Okay. We can manage that.”
They’ve been avoiding towns as much as they can, which is pretty goddam easy out in the desert. So easy that it takes days to reach the closest one on the map, somewhere near the California border, and when they do, the local pharmacy is picked clean.
Because of fucking course it is.
“What about the houses?” Ellie asks before he breaks down completely. “Someone’s gotta have something.”
Almost a dozen abandoned homes into their search, they strike gold. Joel lets himself collapse against one of the walls in the hallway outside the upstairs bathroom while Ellie reads off the labels in the medicine cabinet. Lisinopril. Benadryl. Aspirin.
And finally, amoxicillin.
Joel almost faints in relief.
“Give me that,” he demands, practically ripping the bottle out of her hands. He recognizes amoxicillin from dealing in the Boston QZ’s black market — it was one of those antibiotics that could match the price of any painkiller out there and then some. Damn easy to sell, damn hard to find.
With no idea how much he needs, Joel dry swallows several pills as a start, hoping it actually works and works quickly. Ellie hovers nervously.
“I’m not dying,” he says. “I’m old, and tired, and half fucking deaf, but I’m not dying. Okay?”
Ellie nods like she’s not convinced and slides down the wall next to him. After a moment of silence, she gives him a friendly nudge. “You’re not that old.”
(The medicine mostly does its job — in just a few days, the fever clears up and that particular pain disappears.
But his hearing on the right side never comes back.)
They’re looking up at the stars, either unable or unwilling to fall asleep, when Ellie suddenly breaks the silence with, “Joel? Are we bad people?”
“You’re not.”
She doesn’t look impressed by his self-denigration. “I’ve killed people, too.”
“People who were trying to kill you,” Joel points out. Ellie looks away, not meeting his eyes. He sighs. “Listen, bad people, really bad people, don’t need a reason to do bad things. They do bad things because they like it. Don’t try to understand it, it’s just what they do.”
“What do we do?”
He understands immediately what she means — how are we different from them? The unfortunate truth, aside from the obvious shit like, well at least we don’t eat people, is that there’s not always an easy answer. Joel imagines that most everyone, looking out of their own eyes, believe themselves to be doing the right thing. But as the old adage goes, they’re all everybody else to everybody else, and no matter what else happens, he’s still a villain to all the families of all the innocents he’s killed.
So he falls back on something trite and redundant but not untrue. “Endure and survive.”
That prompts a sad smile from Ellie, which he supposes is better than a frown. She comes over to his side of the dirt and takes his hands in her own, maneuvering his fingers and wrists into what Joel eventually recognizes as the sign language that Sam taught her back in Kansas City.
“Endure,” she says, helping him form that sign before transitioning to the next, “…and survive. Got it?”
Joel signs it back at her, and it makes her grin for real this time.
The desert turns to forest, and the ground beneath their feet becomes rich with the roots of conifers, saplings, ash, willow, cherry — Joel names all he can remember out of Sarah’s little nature guide from their own hiking adventures back home. And if any of his identifications are off because he’s in California right now instead of Texas and the memories of all those hikes that happened more than 20 goddam years ago live in a part of his brain that he’s not used to exercising, well fucking sue him.
The trees get bigger and wider the further west they trek until eventually they stumble on a place where no one could ever mistake what they’re looking at for something else. Redwoods. The tallest trees on Earth.
“Holy shit,” Ellie says, her mouth hanging open as they stand under the canopies of giants.
Joel grins. Redwoods got nothing on Ellie and the amazement all over her face. He’s missed that. “They teach you about this in your shitty military school?”
She shakes her head, still staring up at the colossal wonders of the natural world. Joel lets them make camp in the shade of the redwoods, and though that means there will be no easy star-gazing, it’s worth it for the chance to wake up among the trees and see the awe in her face all over again.
“We’re not going to find any more Fireflies, are we?” Ellie asks. They’ve got a rare fire going, hidden under a heavy fog passing through the night. “And even if we did, they wouldn’t be able to do what that lab could do.”
Joel figures this conversation was bound to happen sooner or later. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then this all really was just fucking pointless.” The expression on her face is contorted by the shadows dancing in the light of the flames, and Joel catches flashes of anger and regret overcome by quiet resignation.
He gets why it’s so important to her. All the bad stuff will have been worth it. All the hope, too.
Joel crosses over to her side of the fire.
“Saving the whole world was never in the cards. Too much is already gone,” he tells her, thinking first of Sarah, then of Tess, of Sam and Henry and Bill and Frank, of the millions who died in those horrible first few days and the billions who followed in the years after. No vaccine can fix that. “All anybody can do, or could ever do, is try and save their own little piece of it.”
Like Tommy and Maria’s community up in Jackson. Like Bill and Frank’s compound made just for the two of them.
Like Joel and his kid.
Redemption is as much of a fairy tale as any miracle cure. Set everything right, Tess had begged him, but no good he could ever do would make up for the evil he’s done. And yet, as Ellie leans into him and Joel wraps his arms around her, it does feel like he’s kept his promise.
(Save who you can save, Tess also once said. Save who you can save.)
“So where the fuck are we?” Ellie peers at the map Joel’s got open between them, trying to orient herself after months of not seeming to care where all the walking has been taking them.
He points to a spot near the Pacific shoreline. “Somewhere around here.”
“Are we seriously that fucking close to the ocean?” she asks, and it’s the most excited he’s seen her since they found that giraffe in the baseball stadium. “Dude, we gotta see it.”
“We’re not sight-seeing.” Joel folds up the map with every intention of pointing them back east. Back toward Jackson and Tommy. Toward something he and the kid can call home. “You’ve seen an ocean. They all look the same.”
“You know that for sure? How many have you seen?” Ellie waits, and when Joel doesn’t bother responding (because they both know the answer to that: one), she switches back to cajoling him. “Come on, man, we can’t come this far and turn around before we get to the coast.”
There are still several dozen miles, by Joel’s estimation, between them and the Pacific, and the world is too fucked to be wandering around looking at things like the ocean — which isn’t going to feed or protect them — when they really should be hauling ass back to the safety of Wyoming.
But Ellie’s staring at him with a little bit of that hope they’ve lost since Salt Lake City, and even though it’s a bad idea, he’s not gonna be the reason the light disappears from her eyes.
“Hey, Joel. What did the ocean say to the beach?”
He knows this one but shrugs instead of answers. He likes hearing it from her.
“Nothing. It just waved.”
“’Krill’?” Joel shakes his head. “I don’t know about that. Sounds made up to me.”
“Yeah, you’re only saying that because you’re losing,” Ellie says as she adds two more points to her side of the score sheet. “It’s a real word.”
Boggle is not a game so much as an ass-kicking, Joel decides. He’s lost count of how many rounds they’ve played and he hasn’t won a single one. Word puzzles have never been his thing. He and Sarah used to play Scrabble, which has the same mechanic of trying to form words out of a random jumble of letters, and he never won any of those matches, either.
(It was always worth it, though, because he got to see Sarah laugh, even if she was laughing at him. Just like Ellie’s doing now.)
“No, I’m challenging krill,” Joel says.
“Man, really? After I let you have ‘sked’?”
“That’s a real word. I told you, sked is a type of tool. For building. For contractors.” That lie he’s taking to his grave, and he quietly thanks whoever made this game that it didn’t come with a dictionary.
Ellie looks skeptical. “Right.”
“Alright, come on. Definition of krill.”
“Okay, I don’t remember what it is exactly, but they’re basically like little fish. It’s what whales eat.”
“Krill is what whales eat?” Joel asks, his tone full of doubt.
“Yep. We learned about it in school.”
“Your shitty military school? The same one that didn't teach you about redwood trees?"
She smirks at that but doesn’t lose any resolve. “When we get to the ocean, we’ll find some and I’ll show you.”
Words have never been his thing.
He’s always been the kind of person whose feelings came out as actions, even before the outbreak. Always the guy who could build someone a house to live in and never the guy who could explain why. And when the words do come, it’s always shit like, eat up, go to sleep, stay behind me, of course I give a shit about you, it wasn’t time that did it, and never quite the thing he really wants to say. Never quite the thing he really means.
All the times he thinks about saying it will have to be good enough.
(He never said it much to Sarah, either.
Just one more regret.)
As it turns out, Joel was right. All oceans look the same.
Still, they sit in the sand and watch the waves roll in like there’s nothing else in the world. He had almost forgotten what peaceful felt like, or that maybe everything was worth trying to save after all, for moments like this.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out like you wanted,” Joel tells the kid next to him, and though it’s slight, Ellie’s smile falters.
She doesn’t have to ask what he’s talking about.
The world is still broken. The sick and the dead still outnumber the healthy and the living. There are no cures, no heroes, and no miracles.
“Yeah, well,” Ellie says, her grin returning as she gives him a friendly punch to the arm. “I saved you, didn’t I?”
Joel’s not sure if she’s referring to when he was about to die in Kansas City, or after he was stabbed at the university in Colorado, or the way her existence saves him each and every day, or all those things put together.
It doesn’t matter.
“Yeah,” he agrees as they watch the sun set over the water. “I guess you did.”