Final Breaking Point

Spoken in a small hushed whisper, carried in the cold breeze weaving around your shriveled body. Looming buildings that threaten to rain onto the ground in a shower of brick and misfortune. The constant reminder that you are now alone.

Alone. The state in which one person is flanked by none besides themselves, often associated with loneliness although the two are very different concepts. What you are is alone, but what you feel is lonely.

As your head pounds and your hands shake around your firearm, you begin to wonder just when the lines between both started to blur.

This isn't what you planned. You wrote down in your quaint little bullet journal that you wanted to go out with a bang never seen before, yet here you are with your personalized FNP-45 in between your pale fingers. You planned a much grander death, one that might carry into the afterlife as one of your greatest masterpieces, but it's not what happens. Instead, you'll do it the old-fashioned way. The outdated, unoriginal way. For all the strength your arms carry, you struggle to lift the heavy weight crushing all life around you, pant when you try. No, this is horribly off-track, but the whole predicament was horribly off-track. You scowl bitterly to yourself, mulling over how nothing even matters anymore.

Just as you lift the sudden dead weight to your temple, a soft gasp echoes somewhere.

Your eyes snap away any impeding tears in seconds as they scan the terrible Korean slums around you. Nothing. Not a single sign of life save for a few scurrying rats that seemingly materialized out of nowhere. And then you pick up a small glint of metal reflecting from inside a rundown diner just off the old road. Its sign, supposedly once neon, is now just spots of purple lighting sending sparks onto a rotting door. The windows are bashed, looking like the damage was deliberate. You can't discern any distinguishable features from the outside, which makes you think twice about investigating inside.

You do anyway.

As you carefully push open the filthy door, you at once glimpse a vibrant metal bottle situated on a bar deeper within the diner. The material is very polished and new. Alarms go off in your head one second too late as you're tackled to the dingy floor by a pack of wild dogs. They tear at your clothing, reduce you to a screaming mess. Just when one of them aims to sink its teeth into your throat, one abruptly falls on top of you and moves not one more inch. The second follows its mate and then the third. Groaning in pain, you feel around the floor for your discarded pistol in an attempt to rearm yourself, simultaneously tightening what's left of your rags atop your deeper gashes, and you focus your black-specked gaze on a small flabbergasted man hovering above you.

For an eternity, both of you just stare into each other's eyes. How this is possible, you don't know, but what you do know is that if you lie there all night, you're a goner. The stranger shakes his head wildly and drops to the floor next to you, tearing off his own clothes to help you cover your wounds. Not a word is spoken, both of you too surprised to see another living human being to say anything. Only your hisses of pain whenever he touches especially sensitive spots disturbs the silence. And before you know it, your arm is slung over his shoulder and your body being carried outside the diner.

You try twisting your face in confusion in hopes of getting an explanation, but he doesn't even spare you a glance as his eyes hold a newfound fire within them. His strides are sure, almost grounded in hope. You pray that he doesn't kill you later.

The dull lights of the street are replaced with a dim warmth radiating from a small lamp, which you had to squint your eyes from at first as they adjusted to the brighter light. Your savior carefully places you on a soft surface resembling a bed and moves out of your peripherals, leaving you alone to your thoughts.

Someone else? You aren't alone? It's an exhilarating thought -- you were sure nobody else was still alive on the whole planet! But what will this mystery person do with you? Or, you gulp, to you?

Making sure your pistol is still in your grasp, you survey the room for any clues as to who your savior is, but find nothing save for a small frame with seven very, very familiar figures smiling in a picture.

That's when you realize that you didn't really get a good look at the mystery man's face; when you do, the moment he walks back in, it finally clicks. That's no stranger, it's one of your old friends from high school. The second eldest of the group, the only person who isn't smiling in the photo framed on the wall. Then you remember being the one to take that photo, and how later that night everything changed for everyone.

You try to speak, but any words bubbling up your throat are caught in a growing lump that effectively stops you from talking at all. The man just nods in sympathy and wraps you in a tender hug. You want to point out the obvious, that everyone asides from you should be dead, but he doesn't give you a chance to say anything when you feel a growing wetness on your shoulder. The fact that he's crying to you makes the crushing realization all the more vivid; there's nobody else left. Just you and him, two eighths of a whole that will never be complete again. Two eighths of a once well-rounded whole of laughter and playful jabs, many different personalities comping to form eight persons rounded into one group. Two eighths who will have to survive in the wasteland that is now South Korea, and who will have to do it together but alone.

That crushing realization has your own tears spilling over your crumbling walls.