JL OS

Last One Standing

Jennie wanders for four hundred and sixty-five days before she finds Lisa.

In that year and a bit, as she treks through the desolate landscape — the remains of the world — Jennie accepts the fact that she is the last person on Earth. The last survivor on a destroyed planet, its mountains razed to the ground, its countries and kingdoms wiped out almost like a cosmic afterthought. 

The end of the world has come and gone, and Jennie is the only thing left standing.

She wishes she could be gone, too.

Jennie spends her time walking. Just walking. She starts out from Jeonju a few weeks after the fires die down. She'd planned to stay, but after burying as many bodies as she could find, she finds there is nothing left for her in the blackened husk of her hometown. Maybe elsewhere, she could find help? 

So Jennie gets up one morning and just starts walking.

It takes her fifty days — she marks them on a piece of wood she found somewhere — to allow the fear to seep into her. She spends the next fifty curled up in an oddly intact house, sniffling on slightly dusty Hello Kitty sheets before the tears wear her down. Another ten to stare out the empty window frames at the ruined world, and on the hundred and eleventh day, Jennie stands up and makes a plan.

The plan is this: for another hundred days, she'll keep looking. She'll find whoever there is to find and get help and keep walking. She'll give herself a hundred days. 

But if, after all that time, she finds...nothing, then she'll pick a place and live out the rest of her life there, however long it may be.

In the end, she searches for a hundred and twenty days before she finally gives in. In the end, she finds a squat little building on the outskirts of what was once Seoul and cries herself to sleep on the first night of the rest of her life.

It's a decidedly weird feeling to finally visit the capital city after the end of the world. During the day, Jennie climbs through the rubble of broken streets and peeks through fallen beams to see the little signs of life left behind.

There are a few charred supermarkets in an hour's radius of her house; she stumbles into the warehouse of one of them to find a miraculous amount of canned and dry food.

Everything she needs to survive — food, wood, even water, clothes — they're all around her. So what can Jennie do but walk around?

On the four hundred and sixty-fifth day, Jennie is making her way through the farthest quadrant of the city. She hasn't been here before — it's a little out of the way, the road blocked by a huge skyscraper that has fallen down. She's just poking around when she hears a noise.

For a moment she ignores it, taking it for a creaking of some rickety street sign somewhere down the path. By now, she's used to not jumping at every sound she hears. She's learned to not give into hopeful delusions.

"Excuse me?"

Jennie freezes.

"Can you...hello?"

When Jennie turns, holding her breath, she sees a woman staring back at her.

Jennie stares. She doesn't say a word; she just stares at the apparition in front of her.

"Can you understand me?" The woman frowns, desperation blooming on her face. "Hello? Are you—are you Korean? Chinese? Ni hao? Konnichiwa?"

"I—"

The words die in her throat. Jennie coughs, then speaks for the first time since the end of the world.

"I'm Jennie," she says.