The Crash of Worlds - The Last Of Us

Part III - Who Are You?

The silence was thick enough to cut it with a knife, James and Joel just... walked. The uncomfortable energy of both men waiting for the other to say something was painful. Joel hadn't even as much as sighed. It was just. Silence.
"How old are you?" James asked, might as well make small talk. Who gives a fuck anyway how stupid the question is.
"Forty-Seven... you?" Joel sighed, he thought the question was kind of funny. Like something a toddler would ask their friend.
"Thirty-Three."

Joel nodded, that got nothing going. Now James has to ask something else, something that can develop a conversation.
"Who are we looking for?" James sighed, tired of this secrecy. How's he supposed to find someone he doesn't even know the name of?
"A girl. Ellie." Joel replied, a small smile briefly stretching across his face with the utterance of this girl's name.
"Is she your daughter?" Joel paused for a moment, his brain freezing for a moment as he remembered Sarah.
"No... no she's not."

James was extremely thrown off by this reaction, why did Joel get so upset with the question? If the girl isn't his daughter then what does he want with her? Does he even know this kid? Is he some creep chasing a little girl?
"If she's not your daughter, then why do you want to find her?" James asked, Joel immediately caught on to the blonde's concern about his intentions.

"Listen. I ain't no pervert, she's my responsibility. I'm all she has and I don't want her to go out there and get herself killed." Joel replied, stopping in his tracks as he sat against a tree, running his hands through his remarkably soft-looking hair.

James joined Joel on the floor, they were somewhere up north. Wyoming or Idaho. Doesn't matter it was hot out in both places, the tree didn't even have any green on it. All the leafs dead and brittle.

"How'd you meet her?" He asked, Joel pondered the question for a moment. He doesn't know this guy all that well, not sure he should say that much to him.
"I ain't know you well enough to tell you much more," Joel said.
"If we're gonna work together I need you to trust me."

Joel thought for a moment, he just met this guy. But he's right, how's he to look for someone he barely knows? Joel figured he could tell him a few things as long as he kept a close eye on him. The blonde didn't look all that strong and Joel was pretty confident he could take the guy down with ease. The funny thing is that James thinks the same thing with Joel.

"I got tasked to deliver her to a lab. In exchange for a cache." Joel said, bluntly and uninterested.
"Did you deliver her?"
"Yeah. Then the Fireflies tried to kill her. To try and find a vaccine that doesn't exist," James's eyes widened,
"Vaccine?" He interrupted,
"This happens all the time. It never works, even if it did work the world's never gonna go back to the way it was."

Joel was right, scarily so. The outbreak changed everything, it's called an epidemic but it's much more like an apocalypse. Everything's dead, laws are suggestions, and hundreds of thousands of infected roam every inch of this country.

If you're not in a quarantine zone, it's everyone for themselves. You can kill someone, nobody'll stop you besides another stranger. It's hard to imagine the world in a different way than the wasteland it's become. All because of flour.

The fungus contaminated a factory producing flour and wheat products, before they even knew the product was shipped out all around the world. The outbreak came fast, the world seemingly collapsing one fatal night. James was thirteen, and he remembered it vividly.

It was first found in Indonesia. At least that's what they've been told. In an attempt to stop the world ending they bombed the entire country. Nearly everyone there died, yet it was already too late.

Then bombs began to fall into the big cities around the states, more desperate attempts to stop something inevitable. According to the government that's barely still functioning the current population in the United States is 10.2 Million-ish people. And at America's peak, there were nearly 300 Million people here.