Endling I: Leaving the Bunker

July 6, 2026

The more I think about it, the less I care about my name. There is nobody else out there who will ever use it. There's no need to identify me specifically, because there's nobody to tell me apart from. No crowd to get my attention in. I'm the last person. The only person. In the entire world, as far as I know.

Maybe somebody else out there had a bunker like ours. With lead lined walls to keep out nuclear radiation, a cistern with enough water to last ten people ten lifetimes, and a self renewing hydroponics garden. But, even in the bunker, eight of us died after the bombs stopped falling. Ironically, that's why I'm still alive - because there were eight fewer mouths to feed, sixteen fewer lungs breathing the filtered air.

Cancer got four. That was surprising. We were sure there the big C would take most of us, maybe all of us, regardless of the lead walls. Neutron bombs are specifically engineered to irradiate, to leave a huge swath of land incompatible with life. I guess the Arctic Circle is far enough away. God, it's so far away. But still - Joe, Connor, Ezra, and finally Jolie. Jolie, who fought so hard, whose body was the last I slid into the incinerator. She said - actually, it doesn't matter. There's no point anymore. But she said my name, the day before she died. She was the last person who said my name.

Marcus and Shanie killed themselves. Together, which was sweet in a way that fucked the rest of us up for a long time. They were siblings, and grew up in a foster home. I instinctively assumed that meant their childhood was horrible and felt sorry for them, but they insisted I was wrong and that not all foster families are like what you see on television. So then I felt bad for assuming. But they were the kind of people who went out of their way to put you at ease when you said something stupid. It would have been nice if they had been around to put us at ease after we found their bodies.

Stress killed Abe and Sandra. Ezra, who was a nurse practitioner back in the real world, said it was officially pneumonia and pleurisy. But those two had the hardest time adjusting to life in the bunker. They were the first to, well, lose it. We all went through the same cycle, more or less - anger, grief, depression, mania, deluded optimism, and back to anger, but this time the cold sort of anger, the frustrating kind, where they just turn to stone and won't even fight with you when you really wish they would. If you got through all of that, then maybe you could find peace at the end of it. They were patients zero and one for that psychological odyssey. It ended with them sequestering themselves from the rest of us. We would go for weeks without seeing them, until they quietly came back for supplies. That's why we didn't think too much of it when they didn't show up for a month. Moving their bodies to the furnace room was a nightmare.

Joe, Connor, Ezra, Jolie, Marcus, Shanie, Abe, Sandra.

And finally me. Before the wars, I was a pilot. I flew for two of the major airlines for a while, and then I flew short hop charter flights in Canada for sixteen years. You know how, in old cop films, the cop who gets killed near the end was always a few weeks away from retirement, and the hero was just so motivated to avenge them that they ended up saving the day? Well I actually was planning on retiring in December. Right before Christmas, spend Christmas day with my girlfriend, Kate, and her family in Chicago. I was in my plane when the first bomb took out New York City, and I could see the cloud all the way from northern Ontario. It only took eight months for the rest of the world to become uninhabitable.

Kate and I were going to hike the Appalachian trail after I retired. Slowly, over a year or so. That was gonna be our big project together, to stave off boredom and senility and keep our bodies in good shape. We had done some lighter hikes to get ready for it. It's ironic, 'cause now I'm basically going to walk until my body gives up. I'll imagine it's the Appalachian trail and that Kate's ahead of me somewhere waiting for me to catch up, which she always did.

All that to say, I'm leaving the bunker. It would be pretty pointless to stay. I can't jumpstart the human race or anything. There are no problems to solve. I could wait to die in the bunker. Nobody could stop me or make me feel bad for deciding to stay, but I made a promise. And the last human being in the world has to keep their promises.

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Next: Endling II - Departure

This is the first in a series of articles that will track my play through of the game Endling by M. Allen Hall. There are obviously some heavy themes in this game, and I don't intend to shy away from them. But I also understand if you'd rather not go on this journey with me.

The first two articles, including this one, introduce the protagonist and the situation. After that, the game enters a hex-flower-crawling phase, where you go on a journey whose scope is indeterminate. There are survival elements and mechanics, and there are more introspective journaling elements, intertwined in a way that I find fascinating, and I am very eager to explore it.

I have also set new, ambitious goals for my own creative writing. Part of those goals are a daily writing habit. I've set my first goal at 500 words a day. This article is over a thousand, and I imagine future entries will be longer, so it may be several days between entries. But I aim to play this through to completion, and consciously work on my writing technique along the way. I'd be thrilled if you had any thoughts about my writing. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment.