Chapter 36: Find Themselves

After Tommy's Dam, we traveled several more weeks to Colorado. It always amazed me how the landscape could change so much over the course of a few miles. Mountains turned to hills, which turned to valleys. Pine trees turned into maples, whose leaves were turning brown and orange with the changing seasons, their leaves covering everything we passed. I wondered sometimes if we were lost, but Joel always seemed to know where he was going, so I put my trust in him. At the moment, we were traveling along an abandoned highway, approaching the university, and Joel was trying to explain football to us.

"Okay, let me see if get it straight," Ellie said from behind me. I thought she's want to switch between riding with Joel and I each day, but surprisingly, she stuck with me. "If you mess up your fourth down, then you give the ball to the other team?"

"Right, it's called a turnover," Joel answered.

"And if you clear the ten yards, then you're back at…first down?"

"First down, that's right."

I sat and listened to them talk. I tried to understand all that as best I could, but I soon gave up, accepting the fact that I would never truly understand football. It was fun watching them bond, though.

"Man, it's confusing," Ellie said, then asking me, "are you getting it at all?"

"No," I answered. "It sounds like a lot of gibberish to me."

"You just gotta play it a couple times, it'll all make sense," Joel said to both of us. He'd been much more relaxed since Montana, specifically after he apologized to me, which was probably the first time he'd ever done that. That didn't matter, though. What mattered to me was that be obviously cared enough to make amends with me back there, even if that meant going out of his comfort zone like he'd done. The bond that the three of us shared was incredibly strong now.

We'd walked along the outer wall of the college campus for some time, and we just now came to the main entrance. Inside, there were so many buildings pressed together, which was something we hadn't seen since Pittsburgh. It felt almost refreshing to see things like that again. We stopped our horses to take everything in.

"Okay, none of these buildings look like a mirror to me," Ellie said. For that split second, I'd forgotten the entire reason we were there, but when she said it, I realized she was right.

"Well, we'll head to central grounds," Joel said. "Should be able to see most of the campus from there."

We went further into campus, keeping as a slow pace, on the lookout for the science lab. The campus, although it was still amazing to see, since I'd never seen a place look so crammed, yet so open. It seemed like there were plenty of places to just lie around outside if you didn't want to be indoors, and you didn't have to worry about cars or anything. It was so strange.

"So these places…people would just live here and study? Even though they were all grown up?" I asked Joel, who was quite the expert with stuff from the old world. As the three of us had become closer, Joel began to talk more and more, so now, we asked him questions whenever we could.

"Yeah, study, party, and find themselves," he answered. "Figure out what they wanted to do with their lives."

"That's a strange thought," I said. I wondered how things would've been for us if we actually had the choice about what we wanted to do. Ellie had her plan, with the Hotel Empire and ranch house, but I had no idea what I would do. Whatever it was, I knew it would have to involve her.

"There was a lookout up there," Joel pointed to veranda that was a few stories up on one of the brick buildings. There were some chairs sticking up over the top.

"That's a good sign," Ellie said, excitement growing in her voice. I knew she wanted desperately to find the Fireflies; she thought she'd be making something of herself if she did. I felt that she was making something of herself just by surviving each day, but that was one of the things we'd just have to disagree on.

"How many people do you think are here?" she continued. "Fireflies, I mean."

"Reckon it takes quite a crew to run that operation," Joel answered.

"You think there'll be other people mine and Kara's age?"

"…I'm not sure." I hadn't even thought about that possibility, and although it was a great thought, I was kind of doubtful. Even though we'd had Sam around, people our age were few and far between. We'd gotten lucky with him. I didn't think we'd get that lucky again for some time.

One of the buildings had one of its walls completely busted through, so we walked the horses carefully through. Gypsy wasn't so sure about her footing at first, but she trusted me, so she went where I told her. Once a little ways into the building, we came to a metal barrier that reached across the hall.

"Stay, Callus," Joel said as he dismounted his horse to walk over to it. "What kind of name is Callus anyway?"

"Not my fault you forgot to ask Tommy his name," Ellie said. She was the one who'd come up with that name several weeks ago. At first, neither Joel nor I liked it very much, but it soon grew on me. Joel, however, was still unimpressed by is.

"…Callus," he muttered, pushing the barrier open and beginning to step through. As he did, the horses became increasingly skittish, as if they heard something coming toward us.

"What is it?" Joel asked, more to the horses than us.

"Sounds like Runners," I answered.

"Stay with the horses, I'll go check it out," Joel went through the barrier, and closed it behind him.

"Are you sure?" Ellie asked him.

"Yes, I don't want them running off," he answered. "I'll be right back." Ellie dismounted from behind me, and hopped onto Callus to ensure that he wouldn't wander off.

While we were waiting for Joel to return, Ellie asked, "can you imagine living in a place like this?"

"No," I answered. "But I find it hard to think about living a lot of places we've been. It feels like we've been travelling forever."

"Yeah, it does." She looked down on the ground, and mumbled, "try to find themselves…"

"How the fuck do you even begin to find yourself? What is there to find?" I thought out loud. To me, that concept didn't make much sense. You have a personality; that should be the end of it.

"Joel said they wanted to see what they wanted to do with themselves."

"Yeah, I guess they didn't really have to worry about survival first, huh."

"Well, I know what I'd do," she smiled to herself, and looked me in the eye. "What would you do?"

"I don't know. Never thought about it."

"Okay, let me help you," Ellie seemed to become excited. "If you could have any super power, what would you have?"

I didn't understand how that was relevant, but this was Ellie after all, and sometimes she just didn't make any sense, so I played along, "I think I'd like to fly."

"Well, then I think you'd be a good pilot…or an astronaut."

"An astronaut...," I thought out loud. "I like the sound of that." I wasn't joking. Recently, I've found myself looking up at the stars when my insomnia kicked in, since I was never really able to see them in the city. I wanted to be up there with them; close enough to touch them. I knew that would never actually happen, but it helped me fall asleep thinking about it.

"There you go," Ellie grinned. "The hotel mogul and the astronaut. We'd make quite a pair."

"Don't forget Jeeves," I said.

She slapped her forehead playfully, "of course, how stupid of me!"

We both giggled, and Joel suddenly reappeared in the room beyond the barrier.

"Hey," I called to him. "I was thinking…I'd want to be an astronaut."

"That a fact?" he called back, coming over to the barrier, and opening it wide for the horses to get through.

"Yeah. Being up there among the stars…it'd be cool. I'm just saying." Ellie and I walked the horses through the barrier, and over to Joel, who was picking up some kind of weapon I hadn't seen before. It was long, and looked like a machine gun with a small tank attached to it. It looked like it could do some serious damage.

"What is it?" I asked, always intrigued by new weapons.

"Flamethrower," Joel answered, tying it to his backpack.

"If you let me have a turn with the shorty, I won't give you shit about using the flamethrower," I bribed.

"Fine," he dug out the shorty from his pack, and passed it up to me.

"Sweet," I said, putting it in my own backpack. That was probably the biggest weapon he'd ever trusted me with besides a hunting rifle. I felt special.

"It's low on bullets, though," Joel warned me. "So don't go too crazy with it."

"Motherfucker," I said to myself. Of course it would be low on bullets by the time he let me use it. That was just my luck.

Ellie traded places with Joel on Callus' back, and took her old spot of riding behind me. "What about you?" she asked him. "What'd you wanna be?"

We walked the horses out of the building, and continued on through the campus. Joel answered her, but he seemed almost embarrassed by his response, "Well, when I was a kid, I used to wanna be a…a singer." I could see why.

Ellie laughed, "shut up."

"You're joking, right?" I added.

"I'm serious," he said. That was the funniest shit I'd ever heard, and I burst into laughter, forgetting to steer Gypsy for a moment, and almost leading her into a bench.

"Sing something!" Ellie tried, but of course, he refused, which made it all even funnier to me.

"Come on, Joel," I said. "We won't laugh."

"I don't think so," he said.

We came up to what was definitely the center of campus. We were around the biggest brick buildings surrounding a giant quad area with a statue of a man in the middle of it. Walking around the quad was a bunch of tiny creatures that I recognized from pictures over the years.

"Aww, are those monkeys?" I asked.

"Yeah, a whole mess of 'em," Joel said as we drew nearer, the horses causing them to take off running.

"That was kind of awesome," Ellie said as they disappeared among the buildings.

"First time seeing a monkey?" Joel asked her. He knew it was the first time for me.

"First time seeing a monkey," she agreed.

"Mine too," I said to her specifically.

We began to see signs that were pointing to the direction of the science lab, and once we spotted that, we began to see spray-painted Firefly symbols on the sides of the buildings. That was a good sign. That meant that there would have to be something here. I could feel Ellie's excitement rising as she squeezed my waist. We then could see the science lab. Tommy was right; it did look like a giant mirror. As we came up to it, however, something else became clearer.

"No guards," Ellie said, disappointment showing in her voice. "No nothing."

"Yeah, I'd expect to see someone by now," Joel said.

I knew things were looking pretty bleak, but I didn't want her to be discouraged, so I tried to cheer her up, "hey, that doesn't mean anything. There could still be people here. Maybe they went on a patrol or something. I realized how dumb that sounded, but I was willing to try anything for her.

She humored me, though I could tell she wasn't buying my theory, "maybe."

"Let's just get inside," Joel said.

In an attempt to keep her mind off things, I started talking to Joel so she would listen, "you ever been to one of these?"

"What, a university?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"No, not as a student at least."

"How come?" Ellie asked, becoming interested like I hoped she would.

"I…I had Sarah pretty young," Joel said, surprising both of us by speaking her name. He was healing; this was good.

"Were you married?" Ellie asked, taking the plunge into the unknown as usual.

"For a while," he answered.

"What happened?"

"Okay," he ended the conversation. She was satisfied with that; better not to push him.

There was no way to get into the building from the ground floor, so we had to improvise. We dismounted the horses, and Joel found an old dumpster, wheeling it to the side of the building. We climbed on top of it, and were able to reach the second story of the building, and crawled in through a hole in one of the walls. I hoped the horses wouldn't wander off, but there was nothing we could do about it now. We were gonna finish this.