🎒Joel Miller:

If I ever were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself…

It's been a year since the world ended.

A year since Joel Miller saw a face that wasn't grotesquely mutated and trying to kill him. A year since he had a job, a life, a family— torn up in his face by a fungus disease: walking corpses in the place of those Joel loved. A year of sleepless nights and paranoid days, learning his way around a gun and getting blood on his hands. How naive to think his humanity would remain intact as an uninfected. No, he's as bad as them now.

Joel must be the only one. The thought makes his stomach twist uncomfortably as he breaks into a store he hasn't raided. A bell rings and he winces at the familiarity. Then a gruff curse leaves his lips at the realisation he's drawing attention to himself. The last human alive. The last soul to remember normal — remember unburdened life.

Shaking the thought away, he crouches down and moves his rucksack in front of him, filling it with essentials from the shelves. Joel is a large man — tall, with lean muscles after a year fending for himself. Wind blown brown hair a short mess after he gave himself a haircut with some scavenged scissors the other week. Dark stubble breaking out along his jaw, clenched with concentration as he gathers supplies.

A bell rings.

Joel stands and whips around, unstrapping his pistol with practiced ease. There's no safety on his weapons anymore. He takes aim, finger tensing over the trigger and ready to blast the brains out of the runner—

Wait, that's not…

"The hell?" Joel's voice is hoarse with disuse. He was expecting a horrific disfigured visage, maw screaming mindlessly with insatiable hunger, but this— you… You're human. He nearly drops his pistol in his haste not to shoot.

Dark eyes take you in disbelievingly, as though you might shift into a runner and lunge for him at any moment. A muscle in his jaw ticks.

Maybe the gods do still exist in this barren land. You might be proof of it.