Joel's lungs burned as he stumbled through the wreckage of the street. The night was painted in firelight, windows blown open, buildings collapsing under the chaos of a world ending. His ears still rang from the gunshot the soldier's rifle, Sarah's scream, his own voice breaking as he begged. The image replayed with brutal clarity: his daughter collapsing in his arms, warmth spilling over his hands, his mind refusing to accept what his eyes saw.
She was gone.
He wanted to stay there, to cradle her until the world itself stopped spinning. But Tommy had grabbed him, shouting over the roar of flames and the chaos of people running.
"Joel! We gotta go! We have to move now!"
He hadn't even felt his legs moving, hadn't realized his body was being dragged forward. The weight of loss pressed so heavily on him that each step felt like betrayal. Sarah was his little girl his everything and now she was just… gone.
The streets ahead were a nightmare. A line of cars, abandoned and smashed together, horns blaring endlessly. People screamed, some begging for help, others already being dragged down by the infected that swarmed from alleyways. Fire licked the sky where the gas station had gone up, thick black smoke curling like a curtain over the stars.
Joel's hands shook violently as he held his pistol. It was useless; the magazine half-empty, his aim unsteady. His mind wasn't on surviving. It was still back there, holding Sarah.
Tommy kept pulling him forward. "Come on, brother! We don't have time!"
They darted through an alley, past dumpsters overturned and rats scattering. An infected lunged out from a broken side door, mouth frothing, eyes blind with fury. Joel froze, heart pounding, but Tommy fired first clean, efficient. The creature dropped.
Joel stared at the body. Human a day ago. A neighbor maybe. Someone's son or father. Now nothing but a husk, a nightmare.
"Joel, snap out of it!" Tommy barked. His face was streaked with soot and blood. "If you don't keep your head straight, you're dead. You hear me?"
Joel swallowed hard, his throat raw. His voice cracked as he rasped, "She's gone, Tommy. Sarah's gone."
Tommy's expression faltered for only a moment. He tightened his jaw, then forced Joel to keep running. "I know, brother. I know. But if we stop, we're next."
They pushed through the backstreets, weaving around panicked families and abandoned belongings. Every turn was a coin flip: infected or not. Joel's body moved, but his mind wasn't present. All he could hear was her voice echoing in memory: "Dad…"
Hours passed in a blur of fire and screams. Somehow, they reached the outskirts of town, a stretch of woods where the noise dimmed but the silence was worse. Crickets still sang. The wind still whispered through the trees. But behind it all was the distant chorus of gunfire and explosions a reminder that civilization was collapsing just a mile away.
Joel collapsed against a tree, sliding to the ground. His arms shook, his chest heaved, and the gun slipped from his hand. He pressed his palms to his face, but it didn't stop the tears, hot and relentless.
"I couldn't save her," he whispered, voice hoarse. "I couldn't save my little girl."
Tommy crouched beside him, his hand resting on Joel's shoulder. "It wasn't your fault."
Joel's head snapped up, fury burning through grief. "The hell it wasn't! I was right there, Tommy! I was supposed to protect her. And now she's " His words broke into a raw cry. He slammed his fist into the dirt, over and over until his knuckles split.
Tommy let him. Sometimes pain had to bleed out before anything else could get through.
But Joel's collapse didn't last. The forest didn't allow it. A crack of twigs, a guttural moan infected were near. Joel's grief froze into a hard, cold shell. He picked up his pistol, reloaded it with the last rounds he had, and rose to his feet. His eyes were different now. No more pleading. No more softness. Just survival.
"Let's move," he muttered, voice hollow.
The following days were a haze of hunger and exhaustion. They scavenged what they could half-eaten cans, bottled water stolen from abandoned cars. Sleep came in fragments, never safe, never deep. Joel barely spoke. He moved like a machine, mechanical, efficient, detached.
Tommy tried to talk to him, to keep him from sinking too far. "We'll find some folks, brother. Settle in. Maybe even fight back against this madness. You and me we'll figure it out."
Joel never answered. His mind played one scene on repeat. Her face. Her voice. The warmth fading in his arms.
By the end of the first week, they reached a military checkpoint. The world was unraveling fast: cities quarantined, highways sealed, soldiers shooting both infected and civilians alike. The checkpoint was no different armed men barking orders, lines of scared families being searched, people pulled aside for "symptoms."
Joel clenched his jaw, watching a father beg as soldiers dragged his coughing son away. He turned his eyes from it, because if he stared too long, he'd see Sarah in every child.
Tommy nudged him. "We can't stay here. They'll eat us alive with rules and rations."
Joel nodded. He didn't need convincing. Trust was gone from him, burned away with the last shreds of his old life.
They slipped out before the soldiers could register them, heading deeper into the wilderness, following rumors of safe zones and communities holding out.
It was on those nights, under the stars with only the crackle of fire between them, that Joel changed the most. He stopped speaking Sarah's name. He stopped mentioning home, or neighbors, or normalcy. Instead, he focused on simple, brutal truths: food, water, bullets, fire. The building blocks of survival.
One night, Tommy broke the silence. "You can't keep shutting down, Joel. If you do, you're gonna lose yourself."
Joel stared into the fire, his face a mask of stone. "Already lost what mattered."
Tommy wanted to argue, but the emptiness in Joel's tone silenced him.
Weeks turned into months. Joel became sharper, harder. His grief forged him into something cold. He learned how to track animals, how to kill silently, how to scavenge like a predator. Where others hesitated, Joel didn't. Where others still saw humanity in the infected, Joel saw only threats.
The father who once told bad jokes at breakfast, who once tucked Sarah into bed at night, was gone. What remained was a man of survival, a shadow who carried his pain like a weapon.
He never knew never even imagined that somewhere out there, Sarah had survived. That Michael had pulled her from the chaos, hidden her away, and kept her alive. For Joel, she was dead, and that truth defined him.
And as the years passed, the world would learn to fear that kind of man.